LOST  BORDERS 


BY 

MARY    AUSTIN 

AUTHOR  OF 

"THE  LAND  OF  LITTLE  KAIN" 
"SANTA  LUCIA"  ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 
HARPER  &  BROTHERS 
M  -  C  -  M  .  I  X 


Copyright,  1909,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS. 

Alt  rights  reserved. 
Published  October,  1909. 


TO 
MARION     BURKE 

AND     THE 
FRIENDS    OF    A    LONG    YEAR 


3464 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I.  THE  LAND i 

II.  THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA    ....  12 

III.  A  CASE  OF  CONSCIENCE 26 

IV.  THE  PLOUGHED  LANDS 42 

V.  THE  RETURN  OF  MR.   WILLS 52 

VI.  THE  LAST  ANTELOPE 65 

VII.  AGUA  DULCE 82 

VIII.  THE  WOMAN  AT  THE  EIGHTEEN-MILE  ...  94 

IX.  THE  FAKIR .   .     .  in 

X.  THE  POCKET-HUNTER'S  STORY 135 

XI.  THE  READJUSTMENT  . 154 

XII.  BITTERNESS  OF  WOMEN 166 

XIII.  THE  HOUSE  OF  OFFENCE 179 

XIV.  THE  WALKING  WOMAN 195 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

• 
HE    SAID,    "l    HAVE    MISSED    YOU    SO"  .       .       .       .        Frontispiece 

SHE    HAD    BECOME    A    PLAYTHING    OF    WHICH    HE 

WAS    EXTREMELY    FOND Facing  p.     32 

BEFORE    GAVIN    WAS    QUITE    HIMSELF    AGAIN, 

TIAWA  TENDED  HIM "         44 

CATAMENEDA   LAUGHED   AS   SHE   BRACED   HIM 

WITH  HER  FIRM,  YOUNG  BODY    .     .     .     .       "        90 
"THE  MOON  WAS  HALF  HIGH  WHEN  THE  SUN 

WENT  DOWN" "       104 

SHE    LEANED    FORWARD,    LOOKING    STEADILY 

AND  QUIETLY  AT  LOUIS "       166    K-*-*^ 

"WELL,    YOU'VE    MADE    YOUR   BED.     i   GUESS 

YOU    WILL    LIE    IN    IT"     .  "          186 


LOST  BORDERS 


Let's  have  done  with  stranger  faces,  let's  be  quit 

of  staring  eyes, 
Let's  go  back  across  Mohave  where  the  hills  of 

Inyo  rise. 
There's  a  word  we've  lost  between  us  we  shall 

never  hear  again 
In  the  mindless  clang  of  engines  where  they  bray 

the  hearts  of  men. 
Let's   go   seek   it   east   of  Kearsarge  where   the 

seven-mile  shadows  run, 
From  the  great  gray  bulk  of  Williamson  heaved 

up  against  the  sun. 

Let's  go  look  for  Hassayampa,  with  your  arm 
across  my  shoulders, 

Through  the  canons  of  lost  rivers  by  the  bone- 
white  bleaching  bowlders, 

Through  the  scented  glooming  hollows  where  the 
gray  wolf  shadows  flee — 

Where  from  Sur  to  Ubhefre  only  you  and  I 
shall  be; 

And  the  Word — /  cannot  name  it,  but  we'll  learn 
its  sweetest  use 

In  the  moonlit  sandy  reaches  when  the  desert 
wind  is  loose. 


There's  a  little  creek  in  Inyo,  singing  by  beyond 

the  town, 
Through  the  pink  wild-almond  tangle  and  the 

birches  slim  and  brown, 
Where  all  night  we'll  watch  the  star-beams  in 

the  shallow,  open  rills, 
And  the  hot,  bright  moons  of  August  skulking 

low  along  the  hills; 
And  the  Word  will  wake  in  Inyo — never  printed 

in  a  page — 
With   the  wind   that  wakes   the  morning  on   a 

thousand  miles  of  sage. 


LOST    BORDERS 


i 

THE   LAND 

WHEN  the  Paiute  nations  broke  westward 
through  the  Sierra  wall  they  cut  off  a 
remnant  of  the  Shoshones,  and  forced  them 
south  as  far  as  Death  Valley  and  the  borders 
of  the  Mojaves,  they  penned  the  Washoes  in 
and  around  Tahoe,  and  passing  between  these 
two,  established  themselves  along  the  snow-fed 
Sierra  creeks.  And  this  it  was  proper  they 
should  do,  for  the  root  of  their  name-word  is 
Pah,  meaning  water,  to  distinguish  them  from 
their  brothers  the  Utes  of  the  Great  Basin. 

In  time  they  passed  quite  through  the  saw- 
cut  canons  by  Kern  and  Kings  rivers  and 
possessed  all  the  east  slope  of  the  San  Joaquin, 
but  chiefly  they  settled  by  small  clans  and 
family  groups  where  the  pines  leave  off  and  the 
sage  begins  and  the  desert  abuts  on  the  great 


LOST    BORDERS 

Sierra  fault.  On  the  northeast  they  touched 
the  extreme  flanks  of  the  Utes,  and  with  them 
and  the  southerly  tribes  swept  a  wide  arc  about 
that  region  of  mysterious  desertness  of  which 
you  shall  presently  hear  more  particularly. 

The  boundaries  between  the  tribes  and  be 
tween  the  clans  within  the  tribe  were  plainly 
established  by  natural  landmarks — peaks,  hill- 
crests,  creeks,  and  chains  of  water-holes — be 
ginning  at  the  foot  of  the  Sierra  and  continuing 
eastward  past  the  limit  of  endurable  existence. 
Out  there,  a  week's  journey  from  everywhere, 
the  land  was  not  worth  parcelling  off,  and  the 
boundaries  which  should  logically  have  been 
continued  until  they  met  the  canon  of  the 
Colorado  ran  out  in  foolish  wastes  of  sand  and 
inextricable  disordered  ranges.  Here  you  have 
the  significance  of  the  Indian  name  for  that 
country — Lost  Borders.  And  you  can  always 
trust  Indian  names  to  express  to  you  the  largest 
truth  about  any  district  in  the  shortest  phrases. 

But  there  is  more  in  the  name  than  that. 
For  law  runs  with  the  boundary,  not  beyond  it  ; 
it  is  as  fast  to  the  given  landmarks  as  a  limpet  to 
its  scar  on  the  rock.  I  am  convinced  most  men 
make  law  for  the  comfortable  feel  of  it,  defining 
them  to  themselves;  they  shoulder  along  like 


THE    LAND 

blind  worms,  rearing  against  restrictions,  turn 
ing  thereward  for  security  as  climbing  plants 
to  the  warmth  of  a  nearing  wall.  They  pinch 
themselves  with  regulations  to  make  sure  of 
being  sentient,  and  organize  within  organiza 
tions. 

Out  there,  then,  where  the  law  and  the  land 
marks  fail  together,  the  souls  of  little  men  fade 
out  at  the  edges,  leak  from  them  as  water  from 
wooden  pails  warped  asunder. 

Out  there  where  the  borders  of  conscience 
break  down,  where  there  is  no  convention,  and 
behavior  is  of  little  account  except  as  it  gets 
you  your  desire,  almost  anything  mijfot  hap 
pen  ;  does  happen,  in  fact,  though  I  shall  have 
trouble  making  you  believe  it.  Out  there 
where  the  boundary  of  soul  and  sense  is  as  faint 
as  a  trail  in  a  sand-storm,  I  have  seen  things 
happen  that  I  do  not  believe  myself.  That  is 
what  you  are  to  expect  in  a  country  where  the 
names  mean  something.  Ubehebe,  Pharanagat, 
Resting  Springs,  Dead  Man's  Gulch,  Funeral 
Mountains — these  beckon  and  allure.  There 
is  always  a  tang  of  reality  about  them  like  the 
smart  of  wood  smoke  to  the  eyes,  that  warns 
of  neighboring  fires. 

Riding   through   by   the   known   trails,    the 


LOST   BORDERS 

senses  are  obsessed  by  the  coil  of  a  huge  and 
senseless  monotony;  straight,  white,  blinding, 
alkali  flats,  forsaken  mesas;  skimpy  shrubs 
growing  little  and  less,  starved  knees  of  hills 
sticking  out  above  them;  black  clots  of  pines 
high  upon  rubbishy  mountain -heads  —  days 
and  days  of  this,  as  if  Nature  herself  had  ob 
scured  the  medium  to  escape  you  in  her  secret 
operations. 

"^  One  might  travel  weeks  on  end  and  not  come 
on  any  place  or  occasion  whereby  men  may 
live,  and  drop  suddenly  into  close  hives  of  them 
digging*  jostling,  drinking,  lusting,  and  re 
joicing.  Every  story  of  that  country  is  colored 
by  the  fashion  of  the  life  there,  breaking  up  in 
swift,  passionate  intervals  between  long,  dun 
stretches,  like  the  land  that  out  of  hot  sinks 
of  desolation  heaves  up  great  bulks  of  granite 
ranges  with  opal  shadows  playing  in  their 
shining,  snow-piled  curves.  Out  there  beyond 
the  borders  are  the  Shivering  Dunes,  heaps 
upon  heaps  of  blinding  sand  all  acrawl  in  the 
wind,  drifting  and  reforming  with  a  faint, 
stridulent  rustle,  and  black,  wall-sided  box- 
canons  that  give  the  stars  at  midday,  scored 

+  over  with  picture-writings  of  a  forgotten  race. 
There  are  lakes  there  of  a  pellucid  clearness  like 

4 


THE    LAND 

ice,  closed  over  with  man-deep  crystals  of  pure 
salt.  Long  Tom  Bassit  told  me  a  story  of  one 
of  these  which  he  had  from  a  man  who  saw  it. 
It  was  of  an  emigrant  train  all  out  of  its  reckon 
ing,  laboring  in  a  long,  hollow  trough  of  deso 
lation  between  waterless  high  ranges,  arriving 
at  such  a  closed  salt-pit,  too  much  spent  to  go 
around  it  and  trusting  the  salt  crust  to  hold 
under  their  racked  wagons  and  starveling  teams. 
But  when  they  had  come  near  the  middle  of 
the  lake,  the  salt  thinned  out  abruptly,  and,  the 
forward  rank  of  the  party  breaking  through, 
the  bodies  were  caught  under  the  saline  slabs 
and  not  all  of  them  recovered.  There  was  a 
woman  among  them,  and  the  Man-who-saw  had 
cared — cared  enough  to  go  back  years  after 
ward,  when,  after  successive  oven-blast  sum 
mers,  the  salt  held  solidly  over  all  the  lake,  and 
he  told  Tom  Bassit  how,  long  before  he  reached 
the  point,  he  saw  the  gleam  of  red  in  the 
woman's  dress,  and  found  her  at  last,  lying  on 
her  side,  sealed  in  the  crystal,  rising  as  ice  rises 
to  the  surface  of  choked  streams.  Long  Tom 
wished  me  to  make  a  story  of  it.  I  did  once  at 
a  dinner,  but  I  never  got  through  with  it. 
There,  about  the  time  the  candles  began  to 
burn  their  shades  and  red  track  of  the  light 

5 


LOST   BORDERS 

on  the  wine-glasses  barred  the  cloth,  with  the 
white,  disdainful  shoulders  and  politely  in 
credulous  faces  leaning  through  the  smoke  of 
cigarettes,  it  had  a  garish  sound.  Afterward 
I  came  across  the  proof  of  the  affair  in  the 
records  of  the  emigrant  party,  but  I  never 
tried  telling  it  again. 

That  is  why  in  all  that  follows  I  have  set 
down  what  the  Borderers  thought  and  felt; 
for  that  you  have  a  touchstone  in  your  own 
heart,  but  I  should  get  no  credit  with  you  if  I 
were  to  tell  what  really  became  of  Loring,  and 
what  happened  to  the  man  who  went  down 
into  the  moaning  pit  of  Sand  Mountain. 

Curiously,  in  that  country,  you  can  get  any 
body  to  believe  any  sort  of  a  tale  that  has  gold 
in  it,  like  the  Lost  Mine  of  Fisherman's  Peak 
and  the  Duke  o'  Wild  Rose.  Young  Woodin 
brought  me  a  potsherd  once  from  a  kitchen- 
midden  in  Shoshone  Land.  It  might  have 
been,  for  antiquity,  one  of  those  Job  scraped 
himself  withal,  but  it  was  dotted  all  over  with 
colors  and  specks  of  pure  gold  from  the  river 
bed  from  which  the  sand  and  clay  were  scooped. 
Said  he: 

"  You  ought  to  find  a  story  about  this  some 
where." 

6 


THE   LAND 

I  was  sore  then  about  not  getting  myself 
believed  in  some  elementary  matters,  such  as 
that  horned  toads  are  not  poisonous,  and  that 
Indians  really  have  the  bowels  of  compassion. 
Said  I: 

"I  will  do  better  than  that,  I  will  make  a 
story." 

We  sat  out  a  whole  afternoon  under  the  mul 
berry-tree,  with  the  landscape  disappearing  in 
shimmering  heat-waves  around  us,  testing  our 
story  for  likelihood  and  proving  it.  There  was 
an  Indian  woman  in  the  tale,  not  pretty,  for 
they  are  mostly  not  that  in  life,  and  the  earthen 
ware  pot,  of  course,  and  a  lost  river  bedded  with 
precious  sand.  Afterward  my  friend  went  to 
hold  down  some  claims  in  the  Coso  country, 
and  I  north  to  the  lake  region  where  the  red 
firs  are,  and  we  told  the  pot-of-gold  story  as 
often  as  we  were  permitted.  One  night  when 
I  had  done  with  it,  a  stranger  by  our  camp-fire 
said  the  thing  was  well  known  in  his  country. 
I  said,  "Where  was  that?" 

"Coso,"  said  he,  and  that  was  the  first  I  had 
heard  of  my  friend. 

Next  winter,  at  Lone  Pine,  a  prospector  from 
Panamint-way  wanted  to  know  if  I  had  ever 
heard  of  the  Indian-pot  Mine  which  was  lost 

7 


LOST    BORDERS 

out  toward  Pharump.  I  said  I  had  a  piece  of 
the  pot,  which  I  showed  him.  Then  I  wrote 
the  tale  for  a  magazine  of  the  sort  that  gets 
taken  in  camps  and  at  miners'  boarding-houses, 
and  several  men  were  at  great  pains  to  explain 
to  me  where  my  version  varied  from  the  ac 
cepted  one  of  the  hills.  By  this  time,  you  un 
derstand,  I  had  begun  to  believe  the  story 
myself.  I  had  a  spasm  of  conscience,  though, 
when  Tennessee  told  me  that  he  thought  he 
knew  the  very  squaw  of  the  story,  and  when 
the  back  of  the  winter  was  broken  he  meant 
to  make  a  little  "pasear"  in  search  of  the  lost 
river.  But  Tennessee  died  before  spring,  and 
spared  my  confessing.  Now  it  only  needs  that 
some  one  should  find  another  sherd  of  the  gold- 
besprinkled  pot  to  fix  the  tale  in  the  body 
of  desert  myths.  Well — it  had  as  much  fact 
behind  it  as  the  Gunsight,  and  is  more  in 
teresting  than  the  Bryfogle,  which  began  with 
the  finding  of  a  dead  man,  clothless  as  the 
desert  dead  mostly  are,  with  a  bag  of  nuggets 
clutched  in  his  mummied  hands. 

First  and  last,  accept  no  man  s  statement 
that  he  knows  this  Country  of  Lost  Borders 
well.  A  great  number  having  lost  their  lives 
in  the  process  of  proving  where  it  is  not  safe  to 

8 


THE    LAND 

go,  it  is  now  possible  to  pass  through  much  of 
the  district  by  guide  -  posts  and  well  -  known 
water-holes,  but  the  best  part  of  it  remains 
locked,  inviolate,  or  at  best  known  only  to  some 
far -stray  ing  Indian,  sheepherder,  or  pocket 
hunter,  whose  account  of  it  does  not  get  into 
the  reports  of  the  Geological  Survey.  But  a 
boast  of  knowledge  is  likely  to  prove  as  hollow 
as  the  little  yellow  gourds  called  apples  of 
Death  Valley. 

Pure  desertness  clings  along  the  pits  of  the 
long  valleys  and  the  formless  beds  of  vanished 
lakes.  Every  hill  that  lifts  as  high  as  the 
cloud-line  has  some  trees  upon  it,  and  deer  and 
bighorn  to  feed  on  the  tall,  tufted,  bunch  grass 
between  the  boulders.  In  the  year  when 
Tonopah,  turning  upon  itself  like  a  swarm, 
trickled  prospectors  all  over  that  country  from 
Hot  Creek  to  the  Armagosa,  Indians  brought 
me  word  that  the  men  had  camped  so  close 
about  the  water-holes  that  the  bighorn  died  of 
thirst  on  the  headlands,  turned  always  in  the 
last  agony  toward  the  man-infested  springs. 

That  is  as  good  a  pointer  as  any  if  you  go 
waterless  in  the  country  of  Lost  Borders :  where 
you  find  cattle  dropped,  skeleton  or  skin  dried, 
the  heads  almost  invariably  will  be  turned 

9 


LOST   BORDERS 

toward  the  places  where  water-holes  should  be. 
But  no  such  reminders  will  fend  men  from  its 
trails.  This  is  chiefly,  I  am  persuaded,  because 
there  is  something  incomprehensible  to  the 
man-mind  in  the  concurrence  of  death  and 
beauty.  Shall  the  tender  opal  mist  betray 
you  ?  the  airy  depth  of  mountain  blueness,  the 
blazonry  of  painted  wind-scoured  buttes,  the 
far  peaks  molten  with  the  alpen  glow,  cooled 
by  the  rising  of  the  velvet  violet  twilight  tide, 
and  the  leagues  and  leagues  of  stars?  As 
easy  for  a  man  to  believe  that  a  beautiful 
woman  can  be  cruel.  Mind  you,  it  is  men 
who  go  mostly  into  the  desert,  who  love  it  past 
all  reasonableness,  slack  their  ambitions,  cast 
off  old  usages,  neglect  their  families  because  of 
the  pulse  and  beat  of  a  life  laid  bare  to  its 
thews  and  sinews.  Their  women  hate  with 
implicitness  the  life  like  the  land,  stretching 
interminably  whity- brown,  dim  and  shadowy 
blue  hills  that  hem  it,  glimmering  pale  waters 
of  mirage  that  creep  and  crawl  about  its  edges. 
There  was  a  woman  once  at  Agua  Hedionda — 
but  you  wouldn't  believe  that  either. 

If  ths  desert  were  a  woman,  I  know  well 
what  like  she  would  be:  deep-breasted,  broad 
in  the  hips,  tawny,  with  tawny  hair,  great 

10 


THE    LAND 

masses  of  it  lying  smooth  along  her  perfect 
curves,  full  lipped  like  a  sphinx,  but  not  heavy- 
lidded  like  one,  eyes  sane  and  steady  as  the 
polished  jewel  of  her  skies,  such  a  countenance 
as  should  make  men  serve  without  desiring 
her,  such  a  largeness  to  her  mind  as  should 
make  their  sins  of  no  account,  passionate,  but 
not  necessitous,  patient — and  you  could  not 
move  her,  no,  not  if  you  had  all  the  earth  to 
give,  so  much  as  one  tawny  hair's-breadth 
beyond  her  own  desires.  If  you  cut  very  deep 
ly  into  any  soul  that  has  the  mark  of  the  land 
upon  it,  you  find  such  qualities  as  these — as  I 
shall  presently  prove  to  you. 


II 

THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 


A^L  the  trails  in  this  book  begin  at  Lone 
Pine,  winding  east  by  south  and  east 
again,  though  you  will  look  long  without  find 
ing  the  places  where  things  happened  in  them 
unless  you  are  susceptible  to  those  influences 
that  contribute  to  the  fixed  belief  of  mining 
countries,  that  the  hot  essences  of  greed  and 
hate  and  lust  are  absorbed,  as  it  were,  by  the 
means  that  provoke  them,  and  inhere  in  houses, 
lands,  or  stones  to  work  mischief  to  the  pos 
sessor.  This  is  common  in  new  and  untamed 
lands  where  destinies  are  worked  out  in  plain 
sight.  Manuel  de  Borba  could  not  persuade 
Narcisse  Duplin  to  accept  as  a  gift  the  knife 
with  which  he  killed  Mariana,  and  no  miner 
acquainted  with  its  hoodoo  will  have  anything 
to  do  with  the  Minnietta. 

It  lies  out  in  the  stark,  wide  light,  on  the 

12 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

red  flanks  of  Coso,  a  crumbling  tunnel,  a  ruined 
smelter,  and  a  row  of  sun-warped  cabins  under 
tall,  skeleton-white  cliffs;  and  no  man  in  these 
days  visits  it  of  his  own  intention. 

Antone  discovered  it  in  a  forgotten  year. 
No  one  knew  his  other  name;  at  Panimint  he 
was  called  Dutchy,  after  the  use  of  mining 
camps,  from  which  you  gather  that  he  might 
have  been  a  German,  a  Swede,  Norwegian, 
Dane,  or  even  a  Dutchman.  He  was  a  for 
eigner,  very  sick  when  he  came  to  the  hills, 
sicker  when  he  left  them,  and  he  discovered 
the  ledge  in  a  three  weeks'  prospecting  trip, 
from  which  he  returned  to  Jake  Hogan's  cabin 
with  his  pockets  full  of  ore,  elate,  penniless, 
and  utterly  overworn. 

He  talked  it  all  out  with  Hogan,  on  into  the 
night,  with  the  candle  guttering  in  a  bottle  and 
the  winking  specimens  spread  out  on  the 
table  between  them.  The  ore  was  heavy  and 
dull,  and  had  the  greasy  feel  of  richness.  An 
tone  promised  himself  great  things  between 
the  pains  of  a  racking  cough.  He  talked  on 
afterward  in  his  bunk,  maunderingly,  as  his 
fever  rose,  to  which  succeeded  the  stupor  of 
exhaustion.  That  was  why,  three  days  later, 
not  being  able  to  attend  to  it  himself,  Antone 

13 


LOST   BORDERS 

asked  Hogan  to  have  the  ore  assayed  and 
bring  him  the  report.  And  the  report  was  so 
little  in  the  eye  of  his  expectation  that  a  week 
later,  loathing  the  filthy  cabin  and  the  ill- 
cooked  food,  feeling  death  in  his  throat,  all  his 
thought  set  toward  home,  Antone  accepted  the 
two  hundred  dollars  which  Hogan  offered  him 
for  all  right  and  interest  in  his  claim.  Hogan 
saw  him  off  considerately  on  the  Mojave  stage, 
and  immediately  gathered  his  pack  to  set  out 
for  a  certain  gully  faced  by  tall,  white  cliffs, 
where  the  outcrop  was  heavy  and  dull  with  a 
greasy  feel.  Within  a  month  it  was  known  in 
all  Panimint  and  Coso  and  as  far  north  as  Cero 
Gordo  that  Jake  Hogan  had  made  a  good  strike 
at  the  Minnietta. 

'Long  afterward,  when  rage  had  made  him 
drunk,  Hogan,  as  he  cursed  the  Minnietta,  his 
wickedness,  as  it  were,  an  added  poison  to  his 
curse,  told  how  one  night  while  Antone  lay 
sick,  when  the  assay er  had  given  him  the  full 
count  of  the  ore,  amazed  by  its  richness,  he  had 
walked  long  in  the  one  street  barred  with  blocks 
of  light  from  the  dance-houses  roaring  full  of 
song,  and  the  light  of  the  furnaces  glowing  low 
and  evilly  along  the  ground,  walking  up  and 
down  and  contriving  how  he  might  impose  on 

14 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

Antone  the  report  of  some  other  assay,  and 
how,  when  he  had  done  so  successfully,  he  had 
bought  the  claim  for  a  song.  That,  said  Hogan, 
when  he  cursed  the  men  who  had  done  him  out 
of  the  Minnietta,  was  the  sort  of  man  he  was, 
as  much  as  to  say,  being  a  toad,  he  spat  venom 
and  was  not  to  be  trod  upon.  But  at  the  time 
he  must  have  thought  more  cheerfully  of  his 
offence. 

Hogan  organized  a  stock  company  to  open 
the  mine  and  build  a  smelter,  and  began  to 
grow  rich  amazingly.  Jigging  burro  trains 
went  up  and  down  with  water;  eigh teen-mule 
freighters  trailed  in  with  supplies  in  a  wake  of 
tawny  dust.  Beflounced  and  fluttered  women, 
last  indubitable  evidence  of  a  prosperous  camp, 
preened  themselves  in  the  cabins  set  askew 
under  the  white  cliffs. 

It  is  not  given  to  every  man  to  deal  success 
fully  with  mining  stock-companies.  Hogan, 
prospecting  a  grub  stake,  and  Hogan,  owner 
of  the  Minnietta  putting  out  its  thousands  a 
week,  were  much  the  same  person.  Because 
he  was  ignorant  Hogan  did  not  understand  his 
stock-company  when  he  had  organized  it,  and 
because  he  had  come  into  his  property  by 
stealth,  feared  to  lose  it  by  conspiracy.  Before 

15 


LOST   BORDERS 

the  end  of  the  second  year  Hogan  and  the 
Minnietta  Mining  and  Milling  Company  were 
taking  away  each  other's  characters  openly  in 
court. 

Hogan  got  a  judgment  that  gave  him  little 
less  than  half  that  he  asked;  contumaciously 
carried  it  to  a  higher  court  and  got  a  rever 
sal  of  judgment  that  gave  him  nothing  at  all. 
So  at  the  last  he  went  out  of  the  Minnietta 
with  little  more  than  he  had  brought  into  it — 
folly  and  shame,  you  understand,  peering  with 
painted  faces  from  the  little  cabins  under  the 
cliff,  had  had  their  pickings  of  him — and  going, 
cursed  it  with  fluency  and  all  his  might.  Tunnel 
and  shaft  and  winze,  he  cursed  it,  sheave  and 
cross-cut,  pulley  and  belt  and  blast  and  fall 
rope  under  the  hoist,  as  he  had  made  it  he 
cursed  it  in  every  part.  Those  who  heard  him 
maintain  that  in  the  cursing  of  Hogan  was 
wrought  the  Hoodoo  of  the  Minnietta;  but,  in' 
fact,  it  began  in  the  fake  assay  which  Hogan 
carried  to  Antone  in  his  bed,  a  villany  of  which 
he  despoiled  himself  in  his  cursing,  with  the 
wantonness  by  which  a  man,  checked  in  an 
evil,  reveals  the  iniquity  in  which  he  shaped  it. 

After  that  the  Minnietta  Mining  and  Milling 
Company  was  not  uniformly  prosperous;  the 

16 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

price  of  silver  went  down,  or  the  quality  of  the 
ore  fell  off,  and  there  were  months  at  a  time 
when  the  mine  was  shut  down  while  the  di 
rectors  settled  their  private  squabbles.  Now 
and  then,  and  always  at  inopportune  moments, 
the  company  had  streaks  of  economy.  In  one 
of  these  they  happened  upon  McKenna  for 
superintendent,  whose  particular  qualification 
was  that  he  was  cheap,  and  being  no  spender 
at  the  best  of  times,  was  not  always  careful  to 
draw  his  salary  at  the  end  of  the  month.  This 
is  very  bad  business  for  a  mining  country,  as 
McKenna  came  to  know  when  the  next  shut 
down  found  him  with  a  salary  some  fifteen 
months  in  arrears.  He  said  uncomplimentary 
things  about  the  management,  but  did  not 
unnecessarily  harass  the  directors,  because  he 
held  his  job  on  half  pay  until  work  began  again, 
all  of  which  was  still  unpaid  when  the  mine  re 
opened  with  a  small  force  in  April. 

By  this  time,  you  understand,  the  Minnietta 
Mining  and  Milling  Company  was  in  a  rather 
bad  way.  When  the  ore  was  of  high  grade, 
or  the  price  of  silver  went  up  a  few  points,  it 
would  work  the  mine  at  a  profit;  when  neither 
of  these  things  happened  it  ran  at  a  loss,  and 
McKenna  was  their  chief  creditor.  All  this 

17 


LOST   BORDERS 

time  the  flux  of  mining  life  slacked  throughout 
'  that  district,  slacked  and  dribbled  away  down 
the  trails  of  desolate  gulches,  poured  off  quick, 
as  it  had  come,  like  the  sudden  rains  that  burst 
over  those  ranges,  leaving  it  scarred  with  dump 
and  shaft  and  track.  Houses  full  of  cheap, 
:'  garish  furniture  of  the  camps  warped  apart  in 
the  sun,  rabbits  ran  in  and  out  of  the  sagging 
sills.  Five  days'  desolation  lay  between  the 
world  and  the  Minnietta. 

During  the  shut-down  McKenna  stayed  and 
looked  after  the  mine,  he  said  because  it  owed 
him  so  much  he  could  not  afford  to  neglect  it; 
but  really  because  the  desert  had  him,  cat-like, 
between  her  paws.  ^  So  he  stayed  on  and  tink 
ered  about  repairs  for  the  mill  and  the  smelter. 
After  one  such  session  he  was  observed  to  go 
about  in  the  tumultuous  silence  of  a  man  with 
a  doubtful  project,  also  he  ceased  to  vex  the 
management  greatly  about  his  arrears  of 
'  salary.  And  that  was  about  a  year  before  the 
s  Minnietta  was  shut  down  altogether. 

In  the  course  of  time,  McKenna,  as  the  chief 
creditor,  brought  suit,  attached  the  property 
of  the  Company,  and  got  a  judgment  by  default. 
At  that  time  he  could  have  had  the  whole  dis 
trict  on  the  same  terms,  for  something  had 

18 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

happened,  or  was  about  to  happen,  in  some 
other  quarter  which  made  the  value  of  silver 
to  the  ton  about  half  the  cost  of  working  it. 
The  first  thing  McKenna  did  when  he  came  into 
possession  was  to  rip  up  the  smelter. 

This  was  before  the  cyanide  process  was  dis 
covered,  and  the  smelter  was  of  the  rudest  de 
scription — and  McKenna  had  repaired  it.  Four 
great  bars  of  virgin  silver,  half  the  length  of  a 
man's  body  and  of  incredible  thickness,  he  took 
out  of  it  in  the  way  of  leakings.  McKenna  used 
it  to  put  the  property  in  working  order.  The 
thing  which  was  about  to  happen  in  Germany, 
or  Argentina,  or  wherever,  had  not  happened, 
or  if  it  had,  not  with  the  anticipated  effect. 
Silver  went  up.  McKenna  looked  to  the  man 
agement  himself,  grew  sleek,  and  married  a 
wife.  But  the  Hoodoo  worked. 

In  the  second  year  Mrs.  McKenna  had  a 
child,  and  it  died.  Did  I  say  somewhere  that 
women  mostly  hate  the  desert?  Women,  un 
less  they  have  very  large  and  simple  souls, 
need  cover;  clothes,  you  know,  and  furniture, 
social  observances  to  screen  them,  conventions 
to  get  behind;  life  when  it  leaps  upon  them, 
large  and  naked,  shocks  them  into  disorder. 
Mrs.  McKenna,  at  the  Minnietta,  had  the  arm- 
3  19 


LOST   BORDERS 

long  grave  under  the  skeleton  cliffs,  and  McKen- 
na,  with  no  screen  to  his  commonness.  Her 
mind  travelled  back  and  forth  from  these  and 
down  the  gulch  to  a  vista  of  treeless  discolored 
hills.  Finally,  for  very  emptiness,  it  fixed  upon 
McKenna's  assistant.  The  assistant  was  also 
common,  but  he  had  a  little  veil  of  unfamiliarity 
— and  Mrs.  McKenna  was  the  only  woman 
within  three  days.  I  do  not  say  that  what 
happened  wouldn't  have  happened  without 
the  Hoodoo,  given  the  conditions,  any  woman, 
and  the  man;  but  it  served  to  take  McKenna's 
mind  off  the  mine,  and  the  Hoodoo  cut  in  be 
tween.  After  a  while  Mrs.  McKenna  and  the 
superintendent  went  out  of  the  story  by  way 
of  the  Mojave  stage,  and  McKenna,  leaving  the 
mine  in  charge  of  Jordan,  whom  he  had  pro 
moted  from  his  foreman's  job  to  be  superin 
tendent,  was  supposed  to  have  gone  in  search 
of  his  wife.  Whether  he  found  her,  or  if  the 
Hoodoo  stayed  by  him  in  the  place  where  he 
had  gone,  nobody  ever  heard.  I  think  myself 
it  inheres  where  it  was  bred,  in  the  hollow  of 
the  comfortless  thick  hills.  He  was,  however, 
bound  to  lose  the  mine  in  some  such  case  as  he 
had  got  it. 

Jordan  was  the  man  McKenna  had  to  help 
20 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

him  when  he  ripped  up  the  smelter;  he  knew 
exactly  how  the  Minnietta  came  into  his  em 
ployer's  hands  and  thought  well  of  it.  In 
every  mining  camp  there  are  men  incurably 
unable  to  be  lessoned  by  the  logic  of  events. 
McKenna  was  certain  not  to  come  near  the 
mine  again;  might  reasonably  wish  to  be  quit 
of  it.  This  he  might  have  done  profitably,  ex 
cept  for  the  Hoodoo,  for  the  grade  of  the  ore  was 
increasingly  rich.  Jordan,  as  a  practical  miner, 
was  much  about  the  tunnel,  and  being  left  to 
himself  too  much,  had  time  for  thought,  and, 
as  I  have  said,  he  was  the  sort  of  man  who 
admired  the  sort  of  thing  McKenna  had  done. 
Along  in  the  early  summer  the  direction  of  the 
work  in  the  main  gallery  was  altered  at  never 
so  slight  an  angle,  and  in  due  course  of  time 
was  boarded  over. 

Jordan  reported  to  McKenna  that  as  the 
main  lead  appeared  to  be  nearly  worked  out, 
it  would  be  better  to  put  the  mine  on  the  mar 
ket  before  the  fact  became  generally  known. 
Eventually  this  was  done.  The  selling  price 
was  not  large,  but  considering  what  McKenna 
thought  he  knew  of  the  property,  and  what  the 
purchasers  tipped  by  Jordan  did  know,  it  was 
satisfactory  to  both  parties.  In  some  unex- 

21 


LOST    BORDERS 

plained  way  the  Minnietta  came  shortly  into 
the  hands  of  his  former  foreman,  Dan  Jordan, 
who  ripped  up  the  siding  and  uncovered  a  body 
of  high-grade  ore. 

The  Minnietta  is  a  nearly  horizontal  vein  in 
a  crumbling  country  rock  that  necessitates 
timbering  and  an  elaborate  system  of  props 
and  siding.  The  new  owner  had  all  the  petty, 
fiddling  ways  of  a  man  accustomed  to  days' 
wages.  He  bought  second-hand  timbers  from 
abandoned  mines,  and  took  unnecessary  risks 
in  the  matter  of  siding,  and  the  men  grumbled. 

Jordan  did  not  get  on  well  with  his  men;  he 
gave  himself  airs,  and  suspected  an  attempt  to 
cry  down  his  new  dignities.  He  was  swelled 
and  sullen  with  pride  of  his  prosperity.  By 
this  time  the  conviction  of  the  Hoodoo  was 
well  abroad  in  that  country,  and  men  were  few 
and  fearful  who  could  be  hired  to  work  in  the 
Minnietta.  When  there  was  a  good  twenty 
thousand  on  the  dump  the  men  refused  to  go 
into  the  tunnel  again  until  certain  things  were 
remedied.  Jordan,  who  did  not  believe  in  it, 
cursed  the  Hoodoo,  cursed  the  hands,  and  went 
down  into  the  tunnel,  trailing  abuse  behind  him 
for  the  men  who  followed  timorously  far  at  his 
back. 

22 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

"Better  keep  this  side  the  cut,  sir,"  said  one 
of  them,  respectfully  enough,  "them  props 
ain't  no  ways  safe."  Jordan  kicked  the  prop 
scornfully  for  all  answer — and  when  the  men, 
starting  back  from  the  sound  of  falling,  dared 
to  come  up  with  him,  they  found  him  quite 
dead,  his  skull  crushed,  and  buried  under  the 
crumbling  rock. 

After  that  the  Minnietta  passed  in  due 
course  to  Jordan's  heirs,  two  families  of  cousins 
who  knew  nothing  of  silver  mines  except  that 
they  were  supposed  to  be  eminently  desira 
ble. 

Now,  as  they  had  come  into  the  property 
through  no  fault  of  theirs,  if  the  Hoodoo  were 
nothing  more  than  the  logical  tendency  of  evil- 
doing  to  draw  to  and  consume  the  evil-doer, 
they  should  have  been  beyond  its  reach.  This 
would  have  been  the  case  if,  as  you  suppose, 
the  Hoodoo  were  a  myth  begotten  of  a  series 
of  fortuitous  events.  But  you,  between  the 
church  and  the  police,  whose  every  emanation 
of  the  soul  is  shred  to  tatters  by  the  yammer 
ing  of  kin  and  neighbor,  what  do  you  know  of 
the  great,  silent  spaces  across  which  the  voice 
of  law  and  opinion  reaches  small  as  the  rustle 
of  blown  sand  ?  There  the  castings  of  a  man's 

23 


LOST    BORDERS 

soul  lie  in  whatever  shape  of  hate  and  rage  he 
threw  them  from  him. 

There  are  places  in  Lost  Valley  where  in  the 
early  fifties  emigrant  trains  went  through — 
places  so  void  of  wind  and  jostling  weather 
that  the  wheel  -  tracks  show  upon  the  sand, 
plain  from  that  single  passing;  other  places 
where,  as  at  the  Minnietta,  the  reek  of  men's 
passions  lies  in  the  hollow  desertness  like  an 
infection,  as  if  every  timber  had  absorbed  mis 
chief  instead  of  moisture,  and  every  bolt  gives 
it  off  in  lieu  of  rust. 

If  it  were  not  so  there  is  no  reason  why  the 
heirs  of  Dan  Jordan  should  have  gone  to  law 
about  it  while  the  price  of  silver  went  down 
and  down.  They  stripped  themselves  in  liti 
gation  while  the  timbers  sagged  in  the  tunnel 
and  the  cuts  choked  with  rubble.  The  ore 
on  the  dump,  by  no  means  worth  twenty  thou 
sand  by  this  time,  went  to  a  lawyer  who  had 
been  a  very  decent  sort  until  he  became  disso 
lute  through  prosperity  and  neglected  his 
family.  The  battens  of  the  mill,  warped 
through  successive  summers,  fell  off,  and  the 
boards  shrunk  from  each  other  and  curled  at 
the  edges  like  the  lips  of  men  dead  and  sun- 
dried  in  the  desert.  But  if  they  should  come 

24 


THE  HOODOO  OF  THE  MINNIETTA 

together,  or  the  price  of  silver  go  up,  say  three 
points,  unless  they  be  able  to  charge  the  en 
terprise  with  some  counter-passion  of  nobility 
or  sacrifice,  they  stand  a  chance  to  prove,  in 
their  own  persons,  how  the  Hoodoo  works. 


It  is  curious,  though,  and  if  we  considered 
it  long  enough  would  no  doubt  be  terribly  dis 
concerting,  to  see  how  little  account,  when  it 
deals  with  men  singly,  the  desert  takes  of 
nobility  as  we  conceive  it  between  the  walls. 
Clear  out  beyond  the  Borders  the  only  unfor 
givable  offence  is  incompetence;  and  con 
science,  in  as  far  as  it  is  a  hereditary  prejudice 
in  favor  of  a  given  line  of  behavior,  is  no  sort 
of  baggage  to  take  into  the  wilderness,  which 
has  its  own  exigencies  and  occasions,  and  will 
not  be  lived  in  except  upon  its  own  conditions. 
The  case  of  Saunders  is  in  point. 


Ill 

A   CASE   OF    CONSCIENCE 

SAUNDERS  was  an  average  Englishman 
with  a  lung  complaint.  He  tried  Ash- 
fork,  Arizona,  and  Indio,  and  Catalina.  Then 
he  drifted  north  through  the  San  Jacinta 
mountains  and  found  what  he  was  looking  for. 
Back  in  England  he  had  left  so  many  of  the 
things  a  man  wishes  to  go  on  with,  that  he 
bent  himself  with  great  seriousness  to  his  cure. 
He  bought  a  couple  of  pack-burros,  a  pair  of 
cayaques,  and  a  camp  kit.  With  these,  a 
Shakespeare,  a  prayer-book,  and  a  copy  of 
Jngoldsby  Legends,  he  set  out  on  foot  to  explore 
the  coast  of  Lost  Borders.  The  prayer-book 
he  had  from  his  mother;  I  believe  he  read  it 
regularly  night  and  morning,  and  the  copy  of 
Ingoldsby  Legends  he  gave  me  in  the  second 
year  of  his  exile.  It  happened  about  that  time 
I  was  wanting  the  Ingoldsby  Legends,  three  hun- 

26 


A   CASE   OF   CONSCIENCE 

dred  miles  from  a  library,  and  book  money  hard 
to  come  by.  Now  there  is  nearly  always  a 
copy  of  Ingoldsby  Legends  in  the  vicinity  of  an 
Englishman.  Englishmen  think  them  amus 
ing,  though  I  do  not  know  why.  So  I  asked 
my  friend,  the  barkeeper  at  the  Last  Chance, 
to  inquire  for  it  of  the  next  Englishman  who 
hit  the  town.  I  had  to  write  the  name  out 
plainly  so  the  barkeeper  could  remember  it. 
The'  first  who  came  was  an  agent  for  a  London 
mining  syndicate,  and  he  left  an  address  of  a 
book-shop  where  it  could  be  bought.  The  next 
was  a  remittance  man,  and  of  course  he  hadn't 
anything.  If  he  had  he  would  have  put  it  in 
soak.  That  means  he  would  have  put  the  book 
up  for  i  s  value  in  bad  drink,  and  I  write  it  as 
a  part  of  our  legitimate  speech,  because  it  says 
so  exactly  what  had  occurred:  that  particu 
lar  Englishman  had  put  everything,  includ 
ing  his  honor  and  his  immortal  soul,  in  soak. 
And  the  third  was  Saunders.  He  was  so  de 
lighted  to  find  an  appreciator  of  the  Ingoldsby 
Legends  in  the  wilderness,  that  he  offered  to 
come  to  the  house  and  render  the  obscure 
passages,  and  that  was  the  beginning  of  my 
knowing  about  what  went  on  later  at  Ubehebe. 
Saunders  had  drifted  about  from  water-hole 
27 


LOST   BORDERS 

to  water-hole,  living  hardily,  breathing  the 
driest,  cleanest  air,  sleeping  and  waking  with 
the  ebb  and  flow  of  light  that  sets  in  a  mighty 
current  around  the  world.  He  went  up  in 
summer  to  the  mountain  heads  under  the  fox 
tail  pines,  and  back  in  winter  to  watch  the 
wild  almond  bloom  by  Resting  Springs.  He 
saw  the  Medicine  dance  of  the  Shoshones,  and 
hunted  the  bighorn  on  Funeral  Mountains,  and 
dropped  a  great  many  things  out  of  his  life 
without  making  himself  unhappy.  But  he 
kept  the  conscience  he  had  brought  with  him. 
Of  course  it  was  a  man's  conscience  that  al 
lowed  him  to  do  a  great  many  things  that  by 
the  code  and  the  commandments  are  as  wrong 
as  any  others,  but  in  the  end  the  wilderness 
was  too  big  for  him,  and  forced  him  to  a  viola 
tion  of  what  he  called  his  sense  of  duty. 

In  the  course  of  time,  Saunders  came  to  a 
range  of  purplish  hills  lying  west  from  Lost 
Valley,  because  of  its  rounded,  swelling,  fair 
twin  peaks  called  Ubehebe  (Maiden's  Breast). 
It  is  a  good  name.  Saunders  came  there  in 
the  spring,  when  the  land  is  lovely  and  alluring, 
soft  with  promise  and  austerely  virgin.  He 
lingered  in  and  about  its  pleasant  places  until 
the  month  of  the  Deer-Star,  and  it  was  then, 

28 


A   CASE   OF   CONSCIENCE 

when  he  would  come  up  a  week's  journey  to  J 
Lone  Pine,  for  supplies,  he  began  to  tell  me 
about  Turwhase,  the  gray-eyed  Shoshone.  He 
thought  I  would  be  interested,  and  I  was, 
though  for  more  reasons  than  Saunders  at  first 
supposed.  There  is  a  story  current  and  con 
firmed,  I  believe,  by  proper  evidence,  that  a 
man  of  one  of  the  emigrant  trains  that  suffered 
so  much,  and  went  so  far  astray  in  the  hell 
trap  of  Death  Valley,  wandering  from  his 
party  in  search  of  water,  for  want  of  which  he 
was  partly  crazed,  returned  to  them  no  more 
and  was  accounted  dead.  But  wandering  in 
the  witless  condition  of  great  thirst,  he  was 
found  by  the  Shoshones,  and  by  them  carried 
to  their  campody  in  the  secret  places  of  the 
hills.  There,  though  he  never  rightly  knew 
himself,  he  showed  some  skill  and  excellences 
of  the  white  men,  and  for  that,  and  for  his 
loose  wit,  which  was  fearful  to  them,  he  was 
kept  and  reverenced  as  a  Coyote-man  and  a 
Medicine-maker  of  strange  and  fitful  powers. 
And  at  the  end  of  fifteen  years  his  friends  found 
him  and  took  him  away.  As  witness  of  his 
sojourning,  there  is  now  and  then  born  to  the 
descendants  of  that  campody  a  Shoshone  with 
gray  eyes. 

29 


LOST    BORDERS 

When  Saunders  began  to  tell  me  about  Tur- 
whase,  I  knew  to  what  it  must  come,  though 
it  was  not  until  his  mother  wrote  me  that  I 
could  take  any  notice  of  it.  Some  too  solicitous 
person  had  written  her  that  Saunders  had  be 
come  a  squaw-man.  She  thought  he  had  mar 
ried  Turwhase,  and  would  bring  home  a  hand 
ful  of  little  half-breeds  to  inherit  the  estate. 

She  never  knew  how  near  Saunders  came  to 
doing  that  very  thing,  nor  to  say  truth  did  I 
when  I  wrote  her  that  her  son  was  not  married, 
and  that  she  had  nothing  to  fear;  but  with 
the  letter  I  was  able  to  get  out  of  Saunders  as 
much  as  I  did  not  already  know  of  the  story. 

I  suppose  at  bottom  the  things  a  man  loves 
a  woman  for  are  pretty  much  the  same,  though 
it  is  only  when  he  talks  to  you  of  a  woman  not 
of  his  own  class  that  he  is  willing  to  tell  you 
what  those  things  are.  Saunders  loved  Tur 
whase:  first,  because  he  was  lonely  and  had 
to  love  somebody;  then  because  of  the  way  the 
oval  of  her  cheek  melted  into  the  chin,  and  for 
the  lovely  line  that  runs  from  the  waist  to  the 
knee,  and  for  her  soft,  bubbling  laughter;  and 
kept  on  loving  her  because  she  made  him 
comfortable. 

I  suppose  the  white  strain  that  persisted  in 
30 


A   CASE    OF   CONSCIENCE 

her  quickened  her  aptitude  for  white  ways. 
Saunders  taught  her  to  cook.  She  was  never 
weary  nor  afraid.  She  was  never  out  of  tem 
per,  except  when  she  was  jealous,  and  that 
was  rather  amusing.  Saunders  told  me  him 
self  how  she  glowred  and  blossomed  under  his 
caress,  and  wept  when  he  neglected  her.  He 
told  me  everything  I  had  the  courage  to  know. 
When  a  man  has  gone  about  the  big  wilder 
ness  with  slow  death  and  sure  camping  on  his 
trail,  there  is  not  much  worth  talking  about 
except  the  things  that  are.  Turwhase*  had  the 
art  to  provoke  tenderness  and  the  wish  to  pro 
tect,  and  the  primitive  woman's  capacity  for 
making  no  demands  upon  it.  And  this,  in 
fine,  is  how  these  women  take  our  men  from 
us,  and  why,  at  the  last,  they  lose  them. 

If  you  ask  whether  we  discussed  the  ethics 
of  Saunders'  situation — at  first  there  didn't 
appear  to  be  any.  Turwhase  was  as  much 
married  as  if  Church  and  State  had  witnessed 
it;  as  for  Saunders,  society,  life  itself,  had  cast 
him  off.  He  was  unfit  for  work  or  marrying; 
being  right-minded  in  regard  to  his  lung  com 
plaint,  he  drank  from  no  man's  cup  nor  slept 
in  any  bed  but  his  own.  And  if  society  had 
no  use  for  him,  how  had  it  a  right  to  say  what 


LOST   BORDERS 

he  should  do  out  there  in  the  bloomy  violet 
spaces  at  Maiden's  Breast?  Yet,  at  the  last, 
the  Englishman  found,  or  thought  he  found,  a 
moral  issue. 

Maiden's  Breast — virgin  land,  clear  sun,  un 
sullied  airs,  Turwhase.  Isn't  there  a  hint  all 
through  of  the  myth  of  thej^enewal  of  life  in 
a  virgin  embrace?  A  great  many  myths  come 
true  in  the  big  wilderness.  Saunders  went 
down  to  Los  Angeles  once  in  the  year  to  a 
consulting  physician  to  please  his  mother,  not 
because  he  hoped  for  anything.  He  came  back 
from  one  such  journey  looking  like  a  sleep 
walker  newly  awakened.  He  had  been  told 
that  the  diseased  portion  of  his  lung  was  all 
sloughed  away,  and  if  nothing  happened  to 
him  in  six  months  more  of  Ubehebe,  he  might 
go  home!  It  was  then  Saunders'  conscience  be 
gan  to  trouble  him,  for  by  this  time,  you  under 
stand,  Turwhase  had  a  child — a  daughter,  small 
and  gold-colored  and  gray-eyed.  By  a  trick 
of  inheritance  the  eyes  were  like  Saunders' 
mother's,  and  in  the  long  idle  summer  she  had 
become  a  plaything  of  which  he  was  extremely 
fond.  The  mother,  of  course,  was  hopeless. 
She  had  never  left  off  her  blanket,  and  like  all 
Indian  women  when  they  mature,  had  begun 

32 


A   CASE    OF    CONSCIENCE 

to  grow  fat.  Oh,  I  said  he  had  a  man's  con 
science!  Turwhase"  must  be  left  behind,  but 
what  to  do  about  the  daughter  lay  heavily  on 
Saunders'  mind. 

It  made  an  obstinate  ripple  in  his  com 
placency  like  a  snag  in  the  current  of  his 
thought,  which  set  toward  England.  Out  there 
by  the  water-holes,  where  he  had  expected  to 
leave  his  bones,  life  had  been  of  a  simplicity 
that  did  not  concern  itself  beyond  the  happy 
day.  Now  the  old  needs  and  desires  awoke 
and  cried  in  him,  and  along  with  them  the  old, 
obstinate  Anglo-Saxon  prejudice  that  makes 
a  man  responsible  for  his  offspring.  Saunders 
must  have  had  a  bad  time  of  it  with  himself 
before  he  came  to  a  decision  that  he  must  take 
the  child  to  England.  It  would  be  hard  on 
Turwhase;  if  it  came  to  that,  it  would  be  hard 
on  him — there  would  be  explanations.  As  mat 
ters  stood  he  looked  to  make  a  very  good  mar 
riage  at  home,  and  the  half-breed  child  would 
be  against  him.  All  his  life  she  would  be 
against  him.  But  then  it  was  a  question  of 
duty.  Duty  is  a  potent  fetish  of  Englishmen, 
but  the  wilderness  has  a  word  bigger  than  that. 
Just  how  Turwhas6  took  his  decision  about  the 
child  I  never  heard,  but  as  I  know  Indian 

33 


LOST   BORDERS 

women,  I  suppose  she  must  have  taken  it 
quietly  at  first,  said  no,  and  considered  it  done 
with;  then,  as  she  saw  his  purpose  clear,  sat 
wordless  in  her  blanket,  all  its  folds  drawn  for 
ward  as  a  sign  of  sullenness,  her  thick  hair  fall 
ing  on  either  side  to  screen  her  grief;  neither 
moved  to  attend  him,  nor  ate  nor  slept;  and 
at  last  broke  under  it  and  seemed  to  accept, 
put  the  child  from  her  as  though  it  was  already 
not  hers,  and  made  no  more  of  it. 

If  there  was  in  this  acquiescence  a  gleam  in 
her  gray  eye  that  witnessed  she  had  found  the 
word,  Saunders  was  not  aware  of  it. 

As  to  what  he  felt  himself  in  regard  to  Tur- 
whase  I  am  equally  uninformed.  I've  a  notion, 
though,  that  men  do  not  give  themselves  time 
to  feel  in  such  instances ;  they  just  get  it  over 
with.  All  I  was  told  was,  that  when  at  last  he 
felt  himself  strong  for  it,  Saunders  put  the  child 
before  him  on  the  horse — she  was  then  about 
two  years  old — and  set  out  from  Ubehebe.  He 
went  all  of  one  day  down  a  long  box  canon, 
where  at  times  his  knees  scraped  the  walls  on 
either  side,  and  over  the  tortuous  roots  of  the 
mountain  blown  bare  of  the  sand.  The  even 
ing  of  the  next  day  saw  the  contour  of  the 
Maiden's  Breast  purpling  in  the  cast,  fading  at 

34 


A   CASE   OF   CONSCIENCE 

last  in  the  blurred  horizon.  He  rode  all  day 
on  glittering  pale  sands  and  down  steep  and 
utterly  barren  barrancas.  All  through  that 
riding  something  pricked  between  his  shoulders, 
troubled  his  sleep  with  expectancy,  haunted 
him  with  a  suggestion  of  impossible  espionage. 
The  child  babbled  at  first,  or  slept  in  his  arm; 
he  hugged  it  to  him  and  forgot  that  its  mother 
was  a  Shoshone.  It  cried  in  the  night  and  be 
gan  to  refuse  its  food.  Great  tears  of  fatigue 
stood  upon  its  cheeks;  it  shook  with  long, 
quivering  sobs,  crying  silently  as  Indian  chil 
dren  do  when  they  are  frightened.  Saunders' 
arm  ached  with  the  weight  of  it ;  his  heart  with 
the  perplexity.  The  little  face  looked  up  at 
him,  hard  with  inscrutable  savagery.  When 
he  came  to  the  Inyo  range  and  the  beaten  trail, 
he  distrusted  his  judgment ;  his  notion  of  rear 
ing  the  child  in  England  began  to  look  ridicu 
lous.  By  the  time  he  had  cleared  the  crest  and 
saw  the  fields  and  orchards  far  below  him,  it 
appeared  preposterous.  And  the  hint  of  fol 
lowing  hung  like  some  pestiferous  insect  about 
his  trail. 

In  all  the  wide,  uninterrupted  glare  no  speck 
as  of  a,  moving  body  swam  within  his  gaze.     By 
what  locked  and  secret  ways  the  presence  kept 
4  35 


LOST    BORDERS 

pace  with  him,  only  the  vultures  hung  high 
under  the  flaring  heaven  could  have  known. 

At  the  hotel  at  Keeler  that  night  he  began 
to  taste  the  bitterness  he  had  chosen.  Men, 
white  men,  mining  men,  mill  superintendents, 
well-dressed,  competent,  looked  at  the  brat 
which  had  Shoshone  written  plainly  all  over 
it,  and  looked  away  unsmiling;  being  gentle 
men,  they  did  not  so  much  as  look  at  one  an 
other.  Saunders  gave  money  to  the  women 
at  the  hotel  to  keep  his  daughter  all  night  out 
of  his  sight.  Riding  next  day  toward  Lone 
Pine  between  the  fenced  lands,  farms  and  farm 
houses,  schools,  a  church,  he  began  to  under 
stand  that  there  was  something  more  than 
mere  irresponsibility  in  the  way  of  desert-faring 
men  who  formed  relations  such  as  this  and 
left  them  off  with  the  land,  as  they  left  the 
clothes  they  wore  there  and  its  tricks  of  speech. 

He  was  now  four  days  from  Ubehebe.  The 
child  slept  little  that  night;  sat  up  in  bed,  lis 
tened;  would  whisper  its  mother's  name  over 
and  over,  questioning,  expectant;  left  off,  still 
as  a  young  quail,  if  Saunders  moved  or  noticed 
it.  It  occurred  to  him  that4he  child  might 
die,  which  would  be  the  best  thing  for  it. 

Coming  out  of  his  room  in  the  early  morning 
36 


A   CASE   OF   CONSCIENCE 

he  stumbled  over  something  soft  in  a  blanket. 
It  unrolled  of  itself  and  stood  up — Turwhase! 
The  child  gave  a  little  leap  in  his  arms  and  was 
still,  pitifully,  breathlessly  still.  The  woman 
stretched  out  her  own  arms,  her  eyes  were  red 
and  devouring. 

"My  baby!"  she  said.  "Give  it  to  me!" 
Without  a  word  Saunders  held  it  out  to  her. 
The  little  dark  arms  went  around  her  neck, 
prehensile  and  clinging;  the  whole  little  body 
clung,  the  lines  of  the  small  face  softened  with 
a  sigh  of  unutterable  content.  Turwhase  drew 
up  her  blanket  and  held  it  close. 

"Mine!"  she  said,  fiercely.  "Mine,  not 
yours!" 

Saunders  did  not  gainsay  her;  he  drew  out  all 
the  money  he  had  and  poured  it  in  her  bosom. 
Turwhase  laughed.  With  a  flirt  of  her  blanket 
she  scattered  the  coins  on  the  ground;  she 
turned  with  dignity  and  began  to  walk  desert- 
ward.  You  could  see  by  the  slope  of  the 
shoulders  under  the  blanket  and  the  swing  of 
her  hips,  as  she  went,  that  she  was  all  Indian. 

Saunders  reached  down  to  me  from  the  plat 
form  of  the  train  that  morning  for  a  last  good- 
by.  He  was  looking  very  English,  smug  and 
freshly  shaven. 

37 


LOST   BORDERS 

"I  am  convinced,"  he  said,  "that  it  really 
wouldn't  have  done,  you  know."  I  believe  he 
thought  he  had  come  to  that  conclusion  by 
himself. 


What  I  like  most  about  the  speech  of  the 
campody  is  that  there  are  no  confidences. 
When  they  talk  there  of  the  essential  per 
formances  of  life,  it  is  because  they  are  essen 
tial  and  therefore  worth  talking  about.  Only 
Heaven,  who  made  my  heart,  knows  why  it 
should  have  become  a  pit,  bottomless  and  in 
satiable  for  the  husks  of  other  people's  experi 
ences,  as  if  it  were  not,  as  I  declare  it,  filled  to 
the  brim  with  the  entertainment  of  its  own 
affairs;  as  if  its  mere  proximity  were  an  ad 
vertisement  for  it,  there  must  be  always  some 
one  letting  fall  confidences  as  boys  drop  stones 
in  wells,  to  listen  afterward  in  some  tale  of 
mine  for  the  faint,  reverberating  sound.  But 
this  is  the  mark  of  sophistication,  that  they 
always  appear  as  confidences,  always  with 
that  wistful  back-stroke  of  the  ego  toward  a 
personal  distinction.  "I  don't  Vnow  why  I 
am  telling  you  this — I  shouldn't  like  to  have 
you  repeat  it" — and  then  the  heart  loosening 

38 


A   CASE   OF   CONSCIENCE 

intimacy  of  speech  and  its  conscious  ease 
ment. 

But  in  a  campody  it  is  possible  to  speak  of 
the  important  operations  of  life  without  shame- 
facedness.  Mid-afternoons  of  late  fall  and 
winter  weather — for  though  you  may  speak  to 
your  brother  man  without  curtailment,  it  is 
not  well  to  do  so  in  summer  when  the  snakes 
are  about,  for  the  snakes  are  two-tongued  and 
carry  word  to  the  gods,  who,  if  they  are  to  be 
of  use  to  you,  must  not  know  too  much  of  your 
affairs — in  mid-afternoon  then,  when  the  women 
weave  baskets  and  grind  at  the  metate,  and 
the  men  make  nets  and  snares,  there  is  good 
talk  and  much  to  be  learned  by  it.  Such  times 
the  sky  is  hard  like  polished  turquoise  set  in 
the  tawny  matrix  of  the  earth,  the  creek  goes 
thinly  over  the  stones,  and  the  very  waters  of 
mirage  are  rolled  back  to  some  shut  fountain 
in  the  skies;  the  plump,  plump!  of  the  metate 
beats  on  under  the  talk  of  the  women  like  the 
comfortable  pulse  of  not  too  insistent  toil. 

When  Indian  women  talk  together,  and  they 
are  great  gossips,  three  things  will  surely  come 
to  the  surface  in  the  course  of  the  afternoon — 
children,  marriage,  and  the  ways  of  the  whites. 
This  last  appears  as  a  sort  of  pageant,  which, 

39 


LOST   BORDERS 

though  it  is  much  of  it  sheer  foolishness,  is 
yet  charged  with  a  mysterious  and  compel 
ling  portent.  They  could  never,  for  example, 
though  they  could  give  you  any  number  of 
fascinating  instances,  get  any  rational  explana 
tion  of  the  effect  of  their  familiar  clear  space 
and  desertness  upon  the  white  man  adventuring 
in  it.  It  was  as  if  you  had  discovered  in  your 
parlor-furniture  an  inexplicable  power  of  in 
citing  your  guest  to  strange  behavior.  And 
what  in  the  conduct  of  men  most  interests 
women  of  the  campody,  or  women  anywhere 
for  that  matter,  is  their  relation  to  women. 
If  this,  which  appears  to  have  rooted  about  the 
time  the  foundations  of  the  earth  were  laid,  is 
proved  amenable  to  the  lack  of  shade,  scarcity 
of  vegetation,  and  great  spaces  disinterested  of 
men — not  these  of  course,  but  the  Power 
moving  nakedly  in  the  room  of  these  things — it 
only  goes  to  show  that  the  relation  is  more  in 
cidental  than  we  are  disposed  to  think  it. 
There  is  nothing  in  the  weather  and  the  dis 
tance  between  water-holes  to  affect  a  man's 
feeling  for  his  children,  as  I  have  already  ex 
plained  to  you  in  the  case  of  Saunders  and  Mr. 
Wills.  But  there  where  the  Borders  run  out, 
through  all  the  talk  of  the  women,  white  women, 

40 


A   CASE   OF    CONSCIENCE 

too,  who  get  no  better  understanding  of  the 
thing  they  witness  to,  through  the  thin  web  of 
their  lives  moves  the  vast  impersonal  rivalry 
of  desertness.  But  because  of  what  I  said  in 
the  beginning  I  can  tell  you  no  more  of  that 
than  I  had  from  Tiawa  in  the  campody  of  Saca- 
buete,  where  there  are  no  confidences. 


IV 

THE    PLOUGHED    LANDS 

TIAWA  came  from  a  Shoshone  camp  of 
three  wickiups  somewhere  between  To- 
quina  and  Fish  Lake  Valley.  When  she  was 
young  and  comely  she  had  come  out  of  that 
country  at  the  heels  of  a  white  man,  and 
wrestled  with  the  wilderness  for  the  love  of 
Curly  Gavin.  Gavin  had  been  swamper  for  Ike 
Mallory's  eighteen-mule  team,  and  when  the 
news  of  rich  strikes  in  the  Ringold  district 
made  red  flares  like  rockets  on  Mallory's  hori 
zon,  he  grub-staked  Curly  to  go  with  Burke  and 
Estes  to  prospect  the  Toquina.  Gavin  had 
a  lot  of  reddish  curls  and  a  lot  of  good-nature 
and  small  vices;  the  rest  of  him  was  sheer  grit. 
The  party  was  out  three  weeks,  made  some  fair 
prospects,  and  had  a  disagreement.  As  to  that, 
there  was  never  any  clear  account,  only  it  be 
came  immensely  important  to  Gavin's  own 

42 


THE    PLOUGHED    LANDS 

mind  that  he  should  get  back  to  Maverick  and 
record  the  location  of  some  claims  before  Burke 
and  Estes  had  a  chance  at  them.  Accordingly 
he  left  the  others  at  Mud  Springs,  and,  with 
one  day's  ration  of  water,  set  out  by  what  he 
believed  to  be  a  short  cut  for  home;  and  he 
had  never  been  loose  in  the  wilderness  before! 
It  was  spring  of  the  year  after  a  winter  of  strong 
rains,  and  a  bloom  on  the  world,  all  the  air  soft 
as  shed  petals.  Every  inch  of  the  moon- white 
soil  had  a  flower  in  it,  purple  or  golden;  morn 
ings  the  light  made  a  luminous  mist  about  the 
long  wands  of  the  creosote,  at  noon  it  slid  and 
shimmered  on  the  slopes  as  the  hills  breathed 
evenly  in  sleep.  It  is  as  easy,  I  say,  to  believe 
that  such  a  land  could  neglect  men  to  their 
death,  as  for  man  to  believe  that  a  lovely 
woman  can  be  unkind.  Gavin,  for  one,  did 
not  believe  it. 

By  noon  of  the  second  day  he  began  to  sus 
pect  he  had  missed  the  trail — by  night  he  was 
sure  of  it,  and  thinking  to  behave  very  sensibly 
walked  back  by  the  stars  to  recover  the  lost 
landmarks.  By  that  time  his  water  was  quite 
gone.  There  came  a  time  soon  after  that  when 
the  one  consuming  desire  of  the  man  was  to 
get  shut  of  the  whole  affair,  the  swimming 

43 


LOST   BORDERS 

earth  that  swung  and  tilted  about  the  pivot 
of  his  feet,  the  hell-bent  sun,  the  tormenting 
thirst,  the  glare  of  the  sand  that  ate  into  his 
eyes.  He  was  horribly  bored;  he  wanted  the 
thing  to  quit,  to  let  him  rest. 

"Have  done,  curse  you!"  he  shouted  to  it. 
As  if  the  land  had  heard  him,  it  reeled  and 
sank;  a  grateful  blackness  swallowed  all  his 
sense.  It  was  about  that  time  Tiawa's  father, 
hunting  chuckwallas,  found  him  and  led  him 
to  his  camp. 

In  the  interval  before  Gavin  was  quite  him 
self  again,  Tiawa  tended  him.  When  he  rose 
in  his  delirium  to  go  to  record  those  claims,  she 
dropped  her  strong  arms  about  him  and  eased 
him  to  the  ground,  rocking  him  in  her  bosom. 
So  long  as  he  did  not  know  her,  her  tenderness 
had  scope  and  power.  But  Gavin  was  annoyed 
when,  as  soon  as  he  was  able  to  travel,  though 
not  properly  fit  for  it,  he  asked  for  a  guide  and 
got  Tiawa.  By  the  usage  of  her  people  it  was 
Tiawa's  right,  because  she  loved  him.  She 
could  do  that — these  gentle  savages  who  will 
not  be  seen  walking  abreast  with  their  women 
grant  them  the  right  to  love  unasked  and  un 
ashamed.  They  have  no  place,  let  me  tell  you, 
in  the  acceptance  or  rejection  of  a  proffered 

44 


THE   PLOUGHED   LANDS 

love,  for  the  snigger  of  the  sophisticated  male. 
Tiawa  was  pretty — so  slim  and  round  of  limb, 
so  smoothly  brown  and  lustrous  eyed!  Gavin 
had  no  scruples,  you  may  be  sure ;  he  was  merely 
in  the  grip  of  another  mistress  who  might  or 
might  not  loose  his  bonds. 

Well  do  I  know  the  way  of  that  tawny- 
throated  one.  If  she  but  turns  toward  our 
valley  with  her  hot  breath  to  blow  back  the 
winter's  rains,  you  hear  the  prophecy  of  that 
usurpation  in  the  flat  trumpeting  of  the  bucks 
that  bell  the  does ;  there  will  be  few  young  that 
season  in  the  lairs  along  Salt  Creek,  the  quail 
will  not  mate;  and  this,  mind  you,  if  she  no 
more  than  turns  toward  us  her  fulgent,  splendid 
smiling  for  the  three  months  between  the  pinon 
harvest  and  the  time  of  taboose.  Judge,  then, 
what  she  would  do  to  man. 

Said  Tiawa's  father,  who  knew  something  of 
white  men,  and  had  looked  between  Gavin's 
eyes  where  the  mark  of  the  desert  was  set: 
"My  daughter,  when  you  have  brought  him  as 
far  as  the  ploughed  lands,  best  you  come  home 
again." 

Tiawa  had  put  on  her  best  bead  necklace  for 
the  journey,  and  her  cheeks  were  smooth  with 
vermilion  earth.  She  did  not  mean  to  come 

45 


LOST    BORDERS 

back.  Tiawa  told  me  this  at  Sacabuete,  mid 
dle  aged  and  fat,  smiling  above  the  metate  as 
she  paused  in  her  grinding,  for  she  had  married 
a  Paiute  after  Gavin  left  her,  and  made  him 
very  comfortable. 

"But  I  did  not  know  then,"  she  said,  "that 
a  white  man  could  take  service  from  such  as 
we  and  not  requite  it.  If  I  had  done  the  half 
of  that  for  a  Shoshone  he  would  have  loved  me, 
for  there  were  not  two  sticks  laid  together  on 
that  journey  that  I  had  not  the  doing  of  it." 

They  made  a  dry  camp  the  first  night,  and 
when  Gavin  from  sheer  weakness  lay  down 
along  the  sand,  and  Tiawa  had  brought  him 
food,  before  the  glow  was  gone  from  the  top  of 
Toquina,  when  the  evening  star  was  lit  and 
the  heaven  was  clear  and  tender,  he  turned  his 
back  on  Tiawa  and  stretched  himself  to  sleep. 
On  her  side  of  the  fire,  Tiawa,  dry-eyed  and  hot 
with  shame,  lay  and  pondered  the  reasons  for 
these  things.  He  was  white,  therefore  he  could 
accept  her  service  without  regarding  the  love 
that  prompted  it,  and  sleep  upon  it  compunc- 
tionless.  In  the  morning  he  spoke  to  her  kind 
ly,  and  she  hoped  again,  for  her  desire  was 
toward  him  and  the  spring  was  in  her  blood; 
but  the  obsession  of  his  errand  was  on  Gavin's 

46 


THE   PLOUGHED   LANDS 

mind,  and  he  did  not  know.  The  morning  wind 
blew  out  the  strands  of  her  thick  hair,  and 
shaped  her  garments  to  her  loveliest  curves 
as  she  brushed  against  him  in  the  trail;  every 
turn  of  her  soft  throat  and  the  glint  of  her 
lustrous  eyes  was  of  love,  but  the  sun-glare  was 
heavy  in  his  eyes,  and  he  did  not  see.  At  the 
end  of  the  third  day,  being  at  the  end  of  her 
woman's  devices,  Tiawa  bethought  her  of  the 
gods.  When  it  was  full  dark,  before  the  moon 
was  up,  she  went  a  little  aside  from  the  camp 
and  made  a  medicine  of  songs.  She  swung  and 
swayed  to  the  postures  of  desire,  beat  upon  the 
full,  young,  aching  breast,  and  sang  to  the  gods 
for  the  satisfaction  of  her  love.  Her  voice 
reached  him  heavy  with  world-old  anguish  of 
women. 

"Aw,  shut  up,  can't  you!"  said  Gavin.  "I 
want  to  go  to  sleep!" 

The  desert  had  him.  He  had  come  into  it 
fearlessly  and  unguarded,  and  it  struck  home; 
but  Tiawa,  who  did  not  know  any  better, 
thought  only  that  she  had  lost.  She  took  off 
her  bead  collar  because  it  had  failed  her,  and 
wiped  the  vermilion  from  her  cheeks.  Only 
service  remained,  and  that  flowed  from  her  as 
naturally  as  the  long  wands  of  the  creosote 

47 


LOST   BORDERS 

flowed  upon  the  wind.  By  day  she  went  be 
fore  him  in  the  trails,  by  night  at  nameless 
water-holes  she  cooked  his  food.  She  did  not 
know  the  places  on  the  map  where  Gavin 
wished  to  go.  She  had  set  out  by  her  father's 
direction  for  the  shortest  cut  to  the  Ploughed 
Lands,  and  as  they  neared  her  heart  sank  in 
wardly  as  she  remembered  her  father's  word. 
For  the  Ploughed  Lands  meant  the  end  of  her 
Indian  world.  It  meant  white  people,  towns, 
farms  at  least — things,  the  desire  of  which  had 
hurried  Gavin  mindlessly  along  the  trail,  the 
comfortable,  long-turned  furrow  in  which  his 
life  ran  wontedly,  the  Ploughed  Lands  where  he 
had  no  need  of  her. 

Out  here  toward  Toquina  in  the  stark 
canons,  in  the  thin-sown  pastures,  she  knew 
the  way  of  subsistence;  there  in  the  fat,  well- 
watered  fields,  unless  Gavin  accepted  her  when 
they  came  to  the  Ploughed  Lands,  she  must 
go  back.  It  is  only  our  pitiful  civilization, 
you  understand,  that  attempts  to  magnify  the 
love  of  man  by  shaming  its  end.  In  her  own 
country  Tiawa  could  venture  much,  as  she 
pitted  herself  against  the  wilderness,  but  in 
the  end  she  lay  all  night  with  her  face  between 
her  arms  weeping  tearlessly.  About  noon  of 

48 


THE    PLOUGHED    LANDS 

the  last  day  they  sighted  the  planted  fields. 
From  a  hill-crest  looking  down  they  saw  the 
dark  smears  of  green  on  the  golden  valley,  and 
out  beyond  these  the  line  of  willows,  the  thin 
gleam  of  the  irrigating  ditch  like  a  blade  from 
which  the  foiled  desert  started  back.  The  rest 
of  that  day's  trudging  was  down  and  down. 
Tiawa  went  before,  and  Gavin,  breathing  more 
evenly  in  the  cooled  air,  felt  the  grip  of  the 
desert  loosen  on  him  with  the  tension  of  a 
spring  released.  He  perceived  suddenly  that 
the  woman  wras  lovely  and  young.  She  was 
not  so  round  by  now,  for  they  had  come  a  long 
way  with  scant  rations;  but  by  the  mark  of 
her  service  upon  her,  he  was  suddenly  aware 
that  she  loved  him. 

"Give  me  that  pack,"  said  Gavin;  "you've 
carried  it  long  enough." 

The  intent  was  kind,  but  to  the  girl  it  was 
the  intimation  of  dismissal;  he  had  refused 
her  love,  and  now  he  would  not  even  have  her 
service.  His  tongue  was  freed  of  the  spell  of 
the  silent  places,  and  he  talked  as  they  went, 
pointing  out  this  ranch  and  that  as  they  went 
down. 

About  sunset  they  came  to  the  out-curve  of 
the  canal  and  the  farthest  corner  of  an  alfalfa 

49 


LOST    BORDERS 

field,  and  made  their  camp  there.  For  the  last 
time  Tiawa  laid  the  sticks  together  under  the 
cooking-pot.  For  the  last  time;  so  it  seemed 
to  Tiawa.  Lights  began  to  come  out  in  the 
ranch  houses,  faint  and  far.  Tiawa  thought  of 
the  little  fires  by  the  huts  in  Toquina ;  tears  in 
her  heart  welled  and  brimmed  about  her  eyes. 
Just  then  Gavin  called  her.  She  turned,  and 
by  the  faint  stars,  by  the  dying  flicker  of  their 
fire,  she  saw  incredibly  that  he  smiled.  And 
to  such  as  Tiawa,  you  understand,  the  smile 
of  a  white  man — a  man  with  ruddy  curls,  broad 
in  the  shoulders  and  young — is  as  the  favor  of 
the  gods. 

"Tiawa?" 

"Great  One!"  she  whispered. 

Still  smiling,  he  stretched  out  his  arm  to  her 
and  hollowed  it  in  invitation  ...  for  he  had 
come  to  the  Ploughed  Lands.  He  was  his 
own  man  again. 


In  the  end — as  I  have  already  explained  to 
you — Gavin  went  back  to  his  own  kind,  and 
Tiawa  married  a  Paiute  and  grew  fat,  for  mostly 
in  encounter  with  the  primal  forces  woman 
gets  the  worst  of  it  except  now  and  then,  when 

5° 


THE   PLOUGHED   LANDS 

there  are  children  in  question,  she  becomes  a 
primal  force  herself. 

Great  souls  that  go  into  the  desert  come  out  lx 
mystics — saints  and  prophets — declaring  un 
utterable  things:  Buddha,  Mahomet,  and  the 
Gallilean,  convincing  of  the  casual  nature  of 
human  relations,  because  the  desert  itself  has 
no  use  for  the  formal  side  of  man's  affairs. 
What  need,  then,  of  so  much  pawing  over  prece 
dent  and  discoursing  upon  it,  when  the  open 
country  lies  there,  a  sort  of  chemist's  cup  for 
resolving  obligations?  Say  whether,  when  all 
decoration  is  eaten  away,  there  remains  any 
bond,  and  what  you  shall  do  about  it. 


V 

THE    RETURN    OF    MR.  WILLS 

MRS.  WILLS  had  lived  seventeen  years  with 
Mr.  Wills,  and  when  he  left  her  for  three, 
those  three  were  so  much  the  best  of  her  mar 
ried  life  that  she  wished  he  had  never  come 
back.  And  the  only  real  trouble  with  Mr. 
Wills  was  that  he  should  never  have  moved 
West.  Back  East  I  suppose  they  breed  such 
men  because  they  need  them,  but  they  ought 
really  to  keep  them  there. 

I  am  quite  certain  that  when  Mr.  Wills  was 
courting  Mrs.  Wills  he  parted  his  hair  in  the 
middle,  and  the  breast-pocket  of  his  best  suit 
had  a  bright  silk  lining  which  Mr.  Wills  pulled 
up  to  simulate  a  silk  handkerchief.  Mrs.  Wills 
had  a  certain  draggled  prettiness,  and  a  way 
of  tossing  her  head  which  came  back  to  her 
after  Mr.  Wills  left,  which  made  you  think  she 
might  have  been  the  prettiest  girl  of  her  town. 

52 


THE   RETURN   OF   MR.   WILLS 

They  were  happy  enough  at  first,  when  Mr. 
Wills  was  a  grocery  clerk,  assistant  Sunday- 
school  superintendent,  and  they  owned  a  cabi 
net  organ  and  four  little  Willses.  It  might 
have  been  that  Mr.  Wills  thought  he  could  go 
right  on  being  the  same  sort  of  a  man  in  the 
West — he  was  clerk  at  the  Bed  Rock  Emporium, 
and  had  brought  the  organ  and  the  children; 
or  it  might  have  been  at  bottom  he  thought 
himself  a  very  different  sort  of  man,  and  meant 
to  be  it  if  he  got  a  chance. 

There  is  a  sort  of  man  bred  up  in  close  com 
munities,  like  a  cask,  to  whom  the  church,  pub 
lic  opinion,  the  social  note,  are  a  sort  of  hoop 
to  hold  him  in  serviceable  shape.  Without 
these  there  are  a  good  many  ways  of  going  to 
pieces.  Mr.  Wills'  way  was  Lost  Mines. 

Being  clerk  at  the  Emporium,  where  miners 
and  prospectors  bought  their  supplies,  he  heard 
a  lot  of  talk  about  mines,  and  was  too  new  to 
it  to  understand  that  the  man  who  has  the 
most  time  to  stop  and  talk  about  it  has  the 
least  to  do  with  mining.  And  of  all  he  heard, 
the  most  fascinating  to  Mr.  Wills,  who  was 
troubled  with  an  imagination,  was  of  the  lost 
mines :  incredibly  rich  ledges,  touched  and  not 
found  again.  To  go  out  into  the  unmapped 

S3 


LOST   BORDERS 

hills  on  the  mere  chance  of  coming  across  some 
thing  was,  on  the  face  of  it,  a  risky  business; 
but  to  look  for  a  mine  once  located,  sampled 
and  proved,  definitely  situated  in  a  particular 
mountain  range  or  a  certain  canon,  had  a 
smack  of  plausibility.  Besides  that,  an  or 
dinary  prospect  might  or  might  not  prove 
workable,  but  the  lost  mines  were  always  amaz 
ingly  rich.  Of  all  the  ways  in  the  West  for  a 
man  to  go  to  pieces  this  is  the  most  insidious. 
Out  there  beyond  the  towns  the  long  Wilder 
ness  lies  brooding,  imperturbable ;  she  puts  out 
to  adventurous  minds  glittering  fragments  of 
fortune  or  romance,  like  the  lures  men  use  to 
catch  antelopes — clip!  then  she  has  them.  If 
Mr.  Wills  had  gambled  or  drank,  his  wife  could 
have  gone  to  the  minister  about  it,  his  friends 
could  have  done  something.  There  was  a 
church  in  Maverick  of  twenty-seven  members, 
and  the  Willses  had  brought  letters  to  it,  but 
except  for  the  effect  it  had  on  Mrs.  Wills,  it 
would  not  be  wrorth  mentioning.  Though  he 
might  never  have  found  it  out  in  the  East,  Mr. 
Wills  belonged  to  the  church,  not  because  of 
what  it  meant  to  himself,  but  for  what  it  meant 
to  other  people.  Back  East  it  had  meant 
social  standing,  repute,  moral  impeccability. 

54 


THE   RETURN   OF   MR.   WILLS 

To  other  people  in  Maverick  it  meant  a  weak 
ness  which  was  excused  in  you  so  long  as  you 
did  not  talk  about  it.  Mr.  Wills  did  not,  be 
cause  there  was  so  much  else  to  talk  about  in 
connection  with  lost  mines. 

He  began  by  grub -staking  Pedro  Ruiz  to 
look  for  the  Lost  Ledge  of  Fisherman's  Peak, 
and  that  was  not  so  bad,  for  it  had  not  been 
lost  more  than  thirty  years,  the  peak  was  not 
a  hundred  miles  from  Maverick,  and,  besides, 
I  have  a  piece  of  the  ore  myself.  Then  he  was 
bitten  by  the  myth  of  the  Gunsight,  of  which 
there  was  never  anything  more  tangible  than 
a  dime's  worth  of  virgin  silver,  picked  up  by 
a  Jay  hawker,  hammered  into  a  sight  for  a  gun; 
and  you  had  to  take  the  gun  on  faith  at  that, 
for  it  and  the  man  who  owned  it  had  quite  dis 
appeared;  and  afterward  it  was  the  Duke  o' 
Wild  Rose,  which  was  never  a  mine  at  all,  mere 
ly  an  arrow-mark  on  a  map  left  by  a  penniless 
lodger  found  dead  in  a  San  Francisco  hotel. 
Grub-staking  is  expensive,  even  to  a  clerk  at 
the  Bed  Rock  Emporium  getting  discounts  on 
the  grub,  and  grub-staked  prospectors  are  about 
as  dependable  as  the  dreams  they  chase,  often 
pure  fakes,  lying  up  at  seldom-visited  water- 
holes  while  the  stake  lasts,  returning  with  wilder 

55 


LOST   BORDERS 

tales  and  clews  more  alluring.  It  was  a  late 
conviction  that  led  Mr.  Wills,  when  he  put  the 
last  remnant  of  his  means  into  the  search  for 
the  White  Cement  mines,  to  resign  his  clerk 
ship  and  go  in  charge  of  the  expedition  him 
self.  There  is  no  doubt  whatever  that  there  is 
a  deposit  of  cement  on  Bald  Mountain,  with 
lumps  of  gold  sticking  out  of  it  like  plums 
in  a  pudding.  It  lies  at  the  bottom  of  a  small 
gulch  near  the  middle  fork  of  Owens  River,  and 
is  overlaid  by  pumice.  There  is  a  camp  kit 
buried  somewhere  near,  and  two  skeletons. 
There  is  also  an  Indian  in  that  vicinity  who  is 
thought  to  be  able  to  point  out  the  exact  loca 
tion — if  he  wrould.  It  is  quite  the  sort  of  thing 
to  appeal  to  the  imagination  of  Mr.  Wills,  and 
he  spent  two  years  proving  that  he  could  not 
find  it.  After  that  he  drifted  out  toward  the 
Lee  district  to  look  for  Lost  Cabin  mine,  be 
cause  a  man  who  had  immediate  need  of  twenty 
dollars,  had,  for  that  amount,  offered  Wills 
some  exact  and  unpublished  information  as  to 
its  location.  By  that  time  Wills'  movements 
had  ceased  to  interest  anybody  in  Maverick. 
He  could  be  got  to  believe  anything  about  any 
sort  of  a  prospect,  providing  it  was  lost. 
The  only  visible  mark  left  by  all  this  was  on 
56 


THE   RETURN   OF   MR.   WILLS 

Mrs.  Wills.  Everybody  in  a  mining- town,  ex 
cept  the  minister  and  professional  gamblers 
who  wear  frock-coats,  dresses  pretty  much 
alike,  and  Wills  very  soon  got  to  wear  in  his 
face  the  guileless,  trustful  fixity  of  the  con 
firmed  prospector.  It  seemed  as  if  the  desert 
had  overshot  him  and  struck  at  Mrs.  Wills, 
and  Richard  Wills,  Esther  Wills,  Benjy  Wills, 
and  the  youngest  Wills,  who  was  called  Mugsey. 
Desertness  attacked  the  door-yard  and  the 
house ;  even  the  cabinet  organ  had  a  weathered 
look.  During  the  time  of  the  White  Cement 
obsession  the  Wills  family  appeared  to  be  in 
need  of  a  grub-stake  themselves.  Mrs.  Wills* 
eyes  were  like  the  eyes  of  trail-weary  cattle;  her 
hands  grew  to  have  that  pitiful  way  of  catch 
ing  the  front  of  her  dress  of  the  woman  not  so 
much  a  slattern  as  hopeless.  It  was  when  her 
husband  went  out  after  Lost  Cabin  she  fell 
into  the  habit  of  sitting  down  to  a  cheap  novel 
with  the  dishes  unwashed,  a  sort  of  drugging 
of  despair  common  among  women  of  the  camps. 
All  this  time  Mr.  Wills  was  drifting  about 
from  camp  to  camp  of  the  desert  borders,  work 
ing  when  it  could  not  be  avoided,  but  mostly 
on  long,  fruitless  trudges  among  the  unmindful 
ranges.  I  do  not  know  if  the  man  was  honest 

57 


LOST   BORDERS 

with  himself;  if  he  knew  by  this  time  that  the 
clew  of  a  lost  mine  was  the  baldest  of  excuses 
merely  to  be  out  and  away  from  everything 
that  savored  of  definiteness  and  responsibility. 
The  fact  was,  the  desert  had  got  him.  All  the 
hoops  were  off  the  cask.  The  mind  of  Mr. 
Wills  faded  out  at  the  edges  like  the  desert 
horizon  that  melts  in  mists  and  mirages,  and 
finally  he  went  on  an  expedition  from  which 
he  did  not  come  back. 

He  had  been  gone  nearly  a  year  when  Mrs. 
Wills  gave  up  expecting  him.  She  had  grown 
so  used  to  the  bedraggled  crawl  of  life  that  she 
might  never  have  taken  any  notice  of  the  dis 
appearance  of  Mr.  Wills  had  not  the  Emporium 
refused  to  make  any  more  charges  in  his  name. 
There  had  been  a  great  many  dry  water-holes 
on  the  desert  that  year,  and  more  than  the 
usual  complement  of  sun-dried  corpses^  In  a 
general  way  this  accounted  for  Mr.  Wills, 
though  nothing  transpired  of  sufficient  definite- 
ness  to  justify  Mrs.  Wills  in  putting  on  a  widow's 
dress,  and,  anyway,  she  could  not  have  af 
forded  it. 

Mrs.  Wills  and  the  children  went  to  work, 
and  work  was  about  the  only  thing  in  Maverick 
of  which  there  was  more  than  enough.  It  was 

58 


THE   RETURN   OF   MR.   WILLS 

a  matter  of  a  very  few  months  when  Mrs.  Wills 
made  the  remarkable  discovery  that  after  the 
family  bills  were  paid  at  the  end  of  the  month, 
there  was  a  little  over.  A  very  little.  Mrs. 
Wills  had  lived  so  long  with  the  tradition  that 
a  husband  is  a  natural  provider  that  it  took 
some  months  longer  to  realize  that  she  not 
only  did  not  need  Mr.  Wills,  but  got  on  better 
without  him.  This  was  about  the  time  she 
was  able  to  have  the  sitting-room  repapered 
and  put  up  lace  curtains.  And  the  next  spring 
the  children  planted  roses  in  the  front  yard. 
All  up  and  down  the  wash  of  Salt  Creek  there 
were  lean  coyote  mothers,  and  wild  folk  of 
every  sort  could  have  taught  her  that  nature 
never  makes  the  mistake  of  neglecting  to  make 
the  child-bearer  competent  to  provide.  But 
Mrs.  Wills  had  not  been  studying  life  in  the 
lairs.  She  had  most  of  her  notions  of  it  from 
the  church  and  her  parents,  and  all  under  the 
new  sense  of  independence  and  power  she  had 
an  ache  of  forlornness  and  neglect.  As  a  mat 
ter  of  fact  she  filled  out,  grew  stronger,  had  a 
spring  in  her  walk.  She  was  not  pining  for  Mr. 
Wills;  the  desert  had  him — for  whatever  con 
ceivable  use,  it  was  more  than  Mrs.  Wills  could 
put  him  to — let  the  desert  keep  what  it  had  got. 

59 


LOST   BORDERS 

It  was  in  the  third  summer  that  she  regained 
a  certain  air  that  made  me  think  she  must 
have  been  pretty  when  Mr.  Wills  married  her. 
And  no  woman  in  a  mining-town  can  so  much 
as  hint  at  prettiness  without  its  being  found 
out.  Mrs.  Wills  had  a  good  many  prejudices 
left  over  from  the  time  when  Mr.  Wills  had  been 
superintendent  of  the  Sunday-school,  and  would 
not  hear  of  divorce.  Yet,  as  the  slovenliness 
of  despair  fell  away  from  her,  as  she  held  up 
her  head  and  began  to  have  company  to  tea, 
it  is  certain  somebody  would  have  broached  it 
to  her  before  the  summer  was  over;  but  by 
that  time  Mr.  Wills  came  back. 

It  happened  that  Benjy  Wills,  who  was 
fourteen  and  driving  the  Bed  Rock  delivery 
wagon,  had  a  runaway  accident  in  which  he 
had  behaved  very  handsomely  and  gotten  a 
fractured  skull.  News  of  it  went  by  way  of 
the  local  paper  to  Tonopah,  and  from  there 
drifted  south  to  the  Funeral  Mountains  and  the 
particular  prospect  that  Mr.  Wills  was  working 
on  a  grub-stake.  He  had  come  to  that.  Per 
haps  as  much  because  he  had  found  .there  was 
nothing  in  it,  as  from  paternal  anxiety,  he  came 
home  the  evening  of  the  day  the  doctor  had 
declared  the  boy  out  of  danger. 

60 


THE   RETURN    OF   MR.   WILLS 

It  was  my  turn  to  sit  up  that  night,  I  remem 
ber,  and  Mrs.  Meyer,  who  had  the  turn  before, 
was  telling  me  about  the  medicines.  There 
was  a  neighbor  woman  who  had  come  in  by 
the  back  door  with  a  bowl  of  custard,  and  the 
doctor  standing  in  the  sitting-room  with  Mrs. 
Wills,  when  Mr.  Wills  came  in  through  the 
black  block  of  the  doorway  with  his  hand  be 
fore  his  face  to  ward  off  the  light — and  perhaps 
some  shamefacedness — who  knows? 

I  saw  Mrs.  Wills  quiver,  and  her  hand  went 
up  to  her  bosom  as  if  some  one  had  struck  her. 
I  have  seen  horses  start  and  check  like  that  as 
they  came  over  the  Pass  and  the  hot  blast  of 
the  desert  took  them  fairly.  It  was  the  stroke 
of  desolation.  I  remember  turning  quickly  at 
the  doctor's  curt  signal  to  shut  the  door  be 
tween  the  sitting-room  and  Benjy. 

"Don't  let  the  boy  see  you  to-night,  Wills," 
said  the  doctor,  with  no  hint  of  a  greeting ;  ' '  he's 
not  to  be  excited."  With  that  he  got  himself 
off  as  quickly  as  possible,  and  the  neighbor 
woman  and  I  went  out  and  sat  on  the  back 
steps  a  long  time,  and  tried  to  talk  about  every 
thing  but  Mr.  Wills.  When  I  went  in,  at  last, 
he  was  sitting  in  the  Morris  chair,  which  had 
come  with  soap- wrappers,  explaining  to  Mrs. 

61 


LOST    BORDERS 

Meyer  about  the  rich  prospect  he  had  left  to 
come  to  his  darling  boy.  But  he  did  not  get 
so  much  as  a  glimpse  of  his  darling  boy  while 
I  was  in  charge. 

Mr.  Wills  settled  on  his  family  like  a  blight. 
For  a  man  who  has  prospected  lost  mines  to 
that  extent  is  positively  not  good  for  anything 
else.  It  was  not  only  as  if  the  desert  had 
sucked  the  life  out  of  him  and  cast  him  back, 
but  as  if  it  would  have  Mrs.  Wills  in  his  room. 
As  the  weeks  went  on  you  could  see  a  sort  of 
dinginess  creeping  up  from  her  dress  to  her 
hair  and  her  face,  and  it  spread  to  the  house 
and  the  doorway.  Mr.  Wills  had  enjoyed  the 
improved  condition  of  his  home,  though  he 
missed  the  point  of  it ;  his  wife's  cooking  tasted 
good  to  him  after  miner's  fare,  and  he  was 
proud  of  his  boys.  He  didn't  want  any  more 
of  the  desert.  Not  he.  "There's  no  place 
like  home,"  said  Mr.  Wills,  or  something  to 
that  effect. 

But  he  had  brought  the  desert  with  him  on 
his  back.  If  it  had  been  at  any  other  time 
than  when  her  mind  was  torn  with  anxiety  for 
Benjy,  Mrs.  Wills  might  have  made  a  fight 
against  it.  But  the  only  practical  way  to 
separate  the  family  from  the  blight  was  to 

62 


THE   RETURN    OF   MR.   WILLS 

divorce  Mr.  Wills,  and  the  church  to  which 
Mrs.  Wills  belonged  admitted  divorce  only  in 
the  event  of  there  being  another  woman. 

Mrs.  Wills  rose  to  the  pitch  of  threatening,  I 
believe,  about  the  time  Mr.  Wills  insisted  on 
his  right  to  control  the  earnings  of  his  sons. 
But  the  minister  called ;  the  church  put  out  its 
hand  upon  her  poor,  staggered  soul  that  sunk 
aback.  The  minister  himself  was  newly  from 
the  East,  and  did  not  understand  that  the 
desert  is  to  be  dealt  with  as  a  woman  and  a 
wanton;  he  was  thinking  of  it  as  a  place  on 
the  map.  Therefore,  he  was  not  of  the  slight 
est  use  to  Mrs.  Wills,  which  did  not  prevent 
him  from  commanding  her  behavior.  And  the 
power  of  the  wilderness  lay  like  a  wasting  sick 
ness  on  the  home. 

About  that  time  Mrs.  Wills  took  to  novel- 
reading  again;  the  eldest  son  drifted  off  up 
Tonopah  way ;  and  Benjy  began  to  keep  back 
a  part  of  the  wages  he  brought  home.  And 
Mr.  Wills  is  beginning  to  collect  misinforma 
tion  about  the  exact  locality  where  Peg-leg 
Smith  is  supposed  to  have  found  the  sun 
burnt  nuggets.  He  does  not  mention  the 
matter  often,  being,  as  he  says,  done  with 
mines;  but  whenever  the  Peg-leg  comes  up  in 


LOST    BORDERS 

talk  I  can  see  Mrs.  Wills  chirk  up  a  little,  her 
gaze  wandering  to  the  inscrutable  grim  spaces, 
not  with  the  hate  you  might  suppose,  but  with 
something  like  hope  in  her  eye,  as  if  she  had 
guessed  what  I  am  certain  of — that  in  time  its 
insatiable  spirit  will  reach  out  and  take  Mr. 
Wills  again. 

And  this  time,  if  I  know  Mrs.  Wills,  he  will 
not  come  back. 


VI 

THE  LAST  ANTELOPE 

THERE  were  seven  notches  in  the  juniper 
by  the  Lone  Tree  Spring  for  the  seven 
seasons  that  Little  Pete  had  summered  there, 
feeding  his  flocks  in  the  hollow  of  the  Ceriso. 
The  first  time  of  coming  he  had  struck  his  axe 
into  the  trunk,  meaning  to  make  firewood,  but 
thought  better  of  it,  and  thereafter  chipped  it 
in  sheer  friendliness,  as  one  claps  an  old  ac 
quaintance,  for  by  the  time  the  flock  has  worked 
up  the  treeless  windy  stretch  from  the  Little 
Antelope  to  the  Ceriso,  even  a  lone  juniper  has 
a  friendly  look.  And  Little  Pete  was  a  friendly 
man,  though  shy  of  demeanor,  so  that  with  the 
best  will  in  the  world  for  wagging  his  tongue, 
he  could  scarcely  pass  the  time  of  day  with 
good  countenance ;  the  soul  of  a  jolly  companion 
with  the  front  and  bearing  of  one  of  his  own 
sheep. 

6s 


LOST    BORDERS 

He  loved  his  dogs  as  brothers;  he  was  near 
akin  to  the  wild  things ;  he  communed  with  the 
huddled  hills,  and  held  intercourse  with  the 
stars,  saying  things  to  them  in  his  heart  that 
his  tongue  stumbled  over  and  refused.  He  knew 
his  sheep  by  name,  and  had  respect  to  signs  and 
seasons;  his  lips  moved  softly  as  he  walked, 
making  no  sound.  Well — what  would  you?  a 
man  must  have  fellowship  in  some  sort. 

Whoso  goes  a-shepherding  in  the  desert  hills 
comes  to  be  at  one  with  his  companions,  grow 
ing  brutish  or  converting  them.  Little  Pete 
humanized  his  sheep.  He  perceived  lovable 
qualities  in  them,  and  differentiated  the  natures 
and  dispositions  of  inanimate  things. 

Not  much  of  this  presented  itself  on  slight 
acquaintance,  for,  in  fact,  he  looked  to  be  of 
rather  less  account  than  his  own  dogs.  He  was 
undersized  and  hairy,  and  had  a  roving  eye; 
probably  he  washed  once  a  year  at  the  shearing 
as  the  sheep  were  washed.  About  his  body 
he  wore  a  twist  of  sheepskin  with  the  wool  out 
ward,  holding  in  place  the  tatters  of  his  cloth 
ing.  On  hot  days  when  he  wreathed  leaves 
about  his  head,  and  wove  him  a  pent  of  twigs 
among  the  scrub  in  the  middle  of  his  flock,  he 
looked  a  faun  or  some  wood  creature  come  out 

66 


THE   LAST  ANTELOPE 

of  pagan  times,  though  no  pagan,  as  was  clearly 
shown  by  the  medal  of  the  Sacred  Heart  that 
hung  on  his  hairy  chest,  worn  open  to  all 
weathers.  Where  he  went  about  sheep-camps 
and  shearings  there  were  sly  laughter  and  tap 
ping  of  foreheads,  but  those  who  kept  the  tale 
of  his  flocks  spoke  well  of  him  and  increased  his 
wage. 

Little  Pete  kept  to  the  same  round  year  by 
year,  breaking  away  from  La  Liebre  after  the 
spring  shearing,  south  around  the  foot  of  Pinos, 
swinging  out  to  the  desert  in  the  wake  of  the 
quick,  strong  rains,  thence  to  Little  Antelope 
in  July  to  drink  a  bottle  for  La  Quatorze,  and  so 
to  the  Ceriso  by  the  time  the  poppy  fires  were 
burned  quite  out  and  the  quail  trooped  at  noon 
about  the  tepid  pools.  The  Ceriso  is  not  prop 
erly  mesa  nor  valley,  but  a  long-healed  crater 
miles  wide,  rimmed  about  with  the  jagged  edge 
of  the  old  cone. 

It  rises  steeply  from  the  tilted  mesa,  over 
looked  by  Black  Mountain,  darkly  red  as  the 
red  cattle  that  graze  among  the  honey-colored 
hills.  These  are  blunt  and  rounded,  tumbling 
all  down  from  the  great  crater  and  the  mesa 
edge  toward  the  long,  dim  valley  of  Little  An 
telope.  Its  outward  slope  is  confused  with  the 

6  67 


LOST   BORDERS 

outlines  of  the  hills,  tumuli  of  blind  cones,  and 
the  old  lava  flow  that  breaks  away  from  it  by 
the  west  gap  and  the  ravine  of  the  spring; 
within,  its  walls  are  deeply  guttered  by  the 
torrent  of  winter  rains. 

In  its  cup-like  hollow,  the  sink  of  its  waters, 
salt  and  bitter  as  all  pools  without  an  outlet, 
waxes  and  wanes  within  a  wide  margin  of  bleach 
ing  reeds.  Nothing  taller  shows  in  all  the 
Ceriso,  and  the  wind  among  them  fills  all  the 
hollow  with  an  eerie  whispering.  One  spring 
rills  down  by  the  gorge  of  an  old  flow  on  the 
side  toward  Little  Antelope,  and,  but  for  the  lone 
juniper  that  stood  by  it,  there  is  never  a  tree 
until  you  come  to  the  foot  of  Black  Mountain. 

The  flock  of  Little  Pete,  a  maverick  strayed 
from  some  rodeo,  a  prospector  going  up  to  Black 
Mountain,  and  a  solitary  antelope  were  all  that 
passed  through  the  Ceriso  at  any  time.  The 
antelope  had  the  best  right.  He  came  as  of  old 
habit;  he  had  come  when  the  lightfoot  herds 
ranged  from  here  to  the  sweet,  mist-watered 
canons  of  the  Coast  Range,  and  the  bucks  went 
up  to  the  windy  mesas  what  time  the  young  ran 
with  their  mothers,  nose  to  flank.  They  had 
ceased  before  the  keen  edge  of  slaughter  that 
defines  the  frontier  of  men. 

68 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

All  that  a  tardy  law  had  saved  to  the  district 
of  Little  Antelope  was  the  buck  that  came  up 
the  ravine  of  the  Lone  Tree  Spring  at  the  set 
time  of  the  year  when  Little  Pete  fed  his  flock 
in  the  Ceriso,  and  Pete  averred  that  they  were 
glad  to  see  each  other.  True  enough,  they 
were  each  the  friendliest  thing  the  other  found 
there;  for  though  the  law  ran  as  far  as  the 
antelope  ranged,  there  were  hill-dwellers  who 
took  no  account  of  it — namely,  the  coyotes. 
They  hunted  the  buck  in  season  and  out,  bayed 
him  down  from  the  feeding  -  grounds,  fended 
him  from  the  pool,  pursued  him  by  relay  races, 
ambushed  him  in  the  pitfalls  of  the  black  rock. 

There  were  seven  coyotes  ranging  the  east 
side  of  the  Ceriso  at  the  time  when  Little  Pete 
first  struck  his  axe  into  the  juniper-tree,  slink 
ing,  sly-footed,  and  evil-eyed.  Many  an  even 
ing  the  shepherd  watched  them  running  lightly 
in  the  hollow  of  the  crater,  the  flash  -  flash  of 
the  antelope's  white  rump  signalling  the  progress 
of  the  chase.  But  always  the  buck  outran  or 
outwitted  them,  taking  to  the  high,  broken 
ridges  where  no  split  foot  could  follow  his  seven- 
leagued  bounds.  Many  a  morning  Little  Pete, 
tending  his  cooking-pot  by  a  quavering  sage 
brush  fire,  saw  the  antelope  feeding  down 

69 


LOST   BORDERS 

toward  the  Lone  Tree  Spring,  and  looked  his 
sentiments.  The  coyotes  had  spoken  theirs 
all  in  the  night  with  derisive  voices;  never  was 
there  any  love  lost  between  a  shepherd  and  a 
coyote.  The  pronghorn's  chief  recommenda 
tion  to  an  acquaintance  was  that  he  could 
outdo  them. 

After  the  third  summer,  Pete  began  to  per 
ceive  a  reciprocal  friendliness  in  the  antelope. 
Early  mornings  the  shepherd  saw  him  rising 
from  his  lair,  or  came  often  upon  the  warm 
pressed  hollow  where  he  had  lain  within  cry  of 
his  coyote-scaring  fire.  When  it  was  midday  in 
the  misty  hollow  and  the  shadows  drawn  close, 
stuck  tight  under  the  juniper  and  the  sage, 
they  went  each  to  his  nooning  in  his  own  fashion, 
but  in  the  half  light  they  drew  near  together. 

Since  the  beginning  of  the  law  the  antelope 
had  half  forgotten  his  fear  of  man.  He  looked 
upon  the  shepherd  with  steadfastness,  he  smelled 
the  smell  of  his  garments  which  was  the  smell 
of  sheep  and  the  unhandled  earth,  and  the  smell 
of  wood  smoke  was  in  his  hair.  They  had 
companionship  without  speech;  they  conferred 
favors  silently  after  the  manner  of  those  who 
understand  one  another.  The  antelope  led  to 
the  best  feeding-grounds,  and  Pete  kept  the 

70 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

sheep  from  muddying  the  spring  until  the  buck 
had  drunk.  When  the  coyotes  skulked  in  the 
scrub  by  night  to  deride  him,  the  shepherd 
mocked  them  in  their  own  tongue,  and  promised 
them  the  best  of  his  lambs  for  the  killing;  but 
to  hear  afar  off  their  hunting  howl  stirred  him 
out  of  sleep  to  curse  with  great  heartiness.  At 
such  times  he  thought  of  the  antelope  and  wish 
ed  him  well. 

Beginning  with  the  west  gap  opposite  the 
Lone  Tree  Spring  about  the  ist  of  August,  Pete 
would  feed  all  around  the  broken  rim  of  the 
crater,  up  the  gullies  and  down,  and  clean 
through  the  hollow  of  it  in  a  matter  of  two 
months,  or  if  the  winter  had  been  a  wet  one, 
a  little  longer,  and  in  seven  years  the  man  and 
the  antelope  grew  to  know  each  other  very  well. 
Where  the  flock  fed  the  buck  fed,  keeping 
farthest  from  the  dogs,  and  at  last  he  came  to 
lie  down  with  it. 

That  was  after  a  season  of  scant  rains,  when 
the  feed  was  poor  and  the  antelope's  flank  grew 
thin;  the  rabbits  had  trooped  down  to  the  ir 
rigated  lands,  and  the  coyotes,  made  more  keen 
by  hunger,  pressed  him  hard.  One  of  those 
smoky,  yawning  days  when  the  sky  hugged  the 
earth,  and  all  sound  fell  back  from  a  woolly 


LOST   BORDERS 

atmosphere  and  broke  dully  in  the  scrub,  about 
the  usual  hour  of  their  running  between  twilight 
and  mid-afternoon,  the  coyotes  drove  the  tall 
buck,  winded,  desperate,  and  foredone,  to  ref 
uge  among  the  silly  sheep,  where  for  fear  of  the 
dogs  and  the  man  the  howlers  dared  not  come. 
He  stood  at  bay  there,  fronting  the  shepherd, 
brought  up  against  a  crisis  greatly  needing  the 
help  of  speech. 

Well — he  had  nearly  as  much  gift  in  that 
matter  as  Little  Pete.  Those  two  silent  ones 
understood  each  other;  some  assurance,  the 
warrant  of  a  free-given  faith,  passed  between 
them.  The  buck  lowered  his  head  and  eased 
the  sharp  throbbing  of  his  ribs;  the  dogs  drew 
in  the  scattered  flocks;  they  moved,  keeping 
a  little  cleared  space  nearest  the  buck ;  he  moved 
with  them;  he  began  to  feed.  Thereafter  the 
heart  of  Little  Pete  warmed  humanly  toward 
the  antelope,  and  the  coyotes  began  to  be  very 
personal  in  their  abuse.  That  same  night  they 
drew  off  the  shepherd's  dogs  by  a  ruse  and  stole 
two  of  his  lambs. 

The  same  seasons  that  made  the  friendliness 
of  the  antelope  and  Little  Pete  wore  the  face 
of  the  shepherd  into  a  keener  likeness  to  the 
weathered  hills,  and  the  juniper  flourishing 

72 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

greenly  by  the  spring  bade  fair  to  outlast  them 
both.  The  line  of  ploughed  lands  stretched 
out  mile  by  mile  from  the  lower  valley,  and  a 
solitary  homesteader  built  him  a  cabin  at  the 
foot  of  the  Ceriso. 

In  seven  years  a  coyote  may  learn  somewhat ; 
those  of  the  Ceriso  learned  the  ways  of  Little 
Pete  and  the  antelope.  Trust  them  to  have 
noted,  as  the  years  moved,  that  the  buck's 
flanks  were  lean  and  his  step  less  free.  Put  it 
that  the  antelope  was  old,  and  that  he  made 
truce  with  the  shepherd  to  hide  the  failing  of  his 
powers;  then  if  he  came  earlier  or  stayed  later 
than  the  flock,  it  would  go  hard  with  him.  But 
as  if  he  knew  their  mind  in  the  matter,  the  ante 
lope  delayed  his  coming  until  the  salt  pool 
shrunk  to  its  innermost  ring  of  reeds,  and  the 
sun-cured  grasses  crisped  along  the  slope.  It 
seemed  the  brute  sense  waked  between  him 
and  the  man  to  make  each  aware  of  the  other's 
nearness.  Often  as  Little  Pete  drove  in  by 
the  west  gap  he  would  sight  the  prongs  of  the 
buck  rising  over  the  barrier  of  black  rocks  at 
the  head  of  the  ravine.  Together  they  passed 
out  of  the  crater,  keeping  fellowship  as  far  as 
the  frontier  of  evergreen  oaks.  Here  Little 
Pete  turned  in  by  the  cattle  fences  to  come  at 

73 


LOST   BORDERS 

La  Liebre  from  the  north,  and  the  antelope, 
avoiding  all  man-trails,  growing  daily  more 
remote,  passed  into  the  wooded  hills  on  un- 
guessed  errands  of  his  own. 

Twice  the  homesteader  saw  the  antelope  go 
up  to  the  Ceriso  at  that  set  time  of  the  year. 
The  third  summer  when  he  sighted  him,  a 
whitish  speck  moving  steadily  against  the  fawn- 
colored  background  of  the  hills,  the  home 
steader  took  down  his  rifle  and  made  haste  into 
the  crater.  At  that  time  his  cabin  stood  on  the 
remotest  edge  of  settlement,  and  the  grip  of 
the  law  was  loosened  in  so  long  a  reach. 

'  *  In  the  end  the  coyotes  will  get  him.  Better 
that  he  fall  to  me,"  said  the  homesteader.  But, 
in  fact,  he  was  prompted  by  the  love  of  mastery, 
which  for  the  most  part  moves  men  into  new 
lands,  whose  creatures  they  conceive  given  over 
into  their  hands. 

The  coyote  that  kept  the  watch  at  the  head 
of  the  ravine  saw  him  come,  and  lifted  up  his 
voice  in  the  long-drawn  dolorous  whine  that 
warned  the  other  watchers  in  their  unseen 
stations  in  the  scrub.  The  homesteader  heard 
also,  and  let  a  curse  softly  under  his  breath,  for 
besides  that  they  might  scare  his  quarry,  he 
coveted  the  howler's  ears,  in  which  the  law 

74 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

upheld  him.  Never  a  tip  nor  a  tail  of  one 
showed  above  the  sage  when  he  had  come  up 
into  the  Ceriso. 

The  afternoon  wore  on;  the  homesteader  hid 
in  the  reeds,  and  the  coyotes  had  forgotten  him. 
Away  to  the  left  in  a  windless  blur  of  dust  the 
sheep  of  Little  Pete  trailed  up  toward  the  cra 
ter's  rim.  The  leader,  watching  by  the  spring, 
caught  a  jack-rabbit  and  was  eating  it  quietly 
behind  the  black  rock. 

In  the  mean  time  the  last  antelope  came 
lightly  and  securely  by  the  gully,  by  the  black 
rock  and  the  lone  juniper,  into  the  Ceriso.  The 
friendliness  of  the  antelope  for  Little  Pete  be 
trayed  him.  He  came  with  some  sense  of  home, 
expecting  the  flock  and  protection  of  man- 
presence.  He  strayed  witlessly  into  the  open, 
his  ears  set  to  catch  the  jangle  of  the  bells. 
What  he  heard  was  the  snick  of  the  breech - 
bolt  as  the  homesteader  threw  up  the  sight  of 
his  rifle,  and  a  small  demoniac  cry  that  ran  from 
gutter  to  gutter  of  the  crater  rim,  impossible 
to  gauge  for  numbers  or  distance. 

At  that  moment  Little  Pete  worried  the 
flock  up  the  outward  slope  where  the  ruin  of  the 
old  lava  flows  gave  sharply  back  the  wrangle 
of  the  bells.  Three  weeks  he  had  won  up  from 

75 


LOST   BORDERS 

the  Little  Antelope,  and  three  by  way  of  the 
Sand  Flat,  where  there  was  great  scarcity  of 
water,  and  in  all  that  time  none  of  his  kind  had 
hailed  him.  His  heart  warmed  toward  the 
juniper-tree  and  the  antelope  whose  hoof-prints 
he  found  in  the  white  dust  of  the  mesa  trail. 
Men  had  small  respect  by  Little  Pete,  women 
he  had  no  time  for:  the  antelope  was  the  no 
blest  thing  he  had  ever  loved.  The  sheep 
poured  through  the  gap  and  spread  fanwise 
down  the  gully ;  behind  them  Little  Pete  twirled 
his  staff,  and  made  merry  wordless  noises  in  his 
throat  in  anticipation  of  friendliness.  "Ehu!" 
he  cried  when  he  heard  the  hunting  howl,  "but 
they  are  at  their  tricks  again,"  and  then  in 
English  he  voiced  a  volley  of  broken,  incon 
sequential  oaths,  for  he  saw  what  the  howlers 
were  about. 

One  imputes  a  sixth  sense  to  that  son  of  a 
thief  misnamed  the  coyote,  to  make  up  for 
speech — persuasion,  concerted  movement — in 
short,  the  human  faculty.  How  else  do  they 
manage  the  terrible  relay  races  by  which  they 
make  quarry  of  the  fleetest- footed  ?  It  was  so 
they  plotted  the  antelope's  last  running  in  the 
Ceriso:  two  to  start  the  chase  from  the  black 
rock  toward  the  red  scar  of  a  winter  torrent, 

76 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

two  to  leave  the  mouth  of  the  wash  when  the 
first  were  winded,  one  to  fend  the  ravine  that 
led  up  to  the  broken  ridges,  one  to  start  out  of 
the  scrub  at  the  base  of  a  smooth  upward  sweep, 
and,  running  parallel  to  it,  keep  the  buck  well 
into  the  open;  all  these  when  their  first  spurt 
was  done  to  cross  leisurely  to  new  stations  to 
take  up  another  turn.  Round  they  went  in  the 
hollow  of  the  crater,  velvet-footed  and  sly  even 
in  full  chase,  and  biding  their  time.  It  was  a 
good  running,  but  it  was  almost  done  when 
away  by  the  west  gap  the  buck  heard  the  voice 
of  Little  Pete  raised  in  adjuration  and  the 
friendly  blether  of  the  sheep.  Thin  spirals  of 
dust  flared  upward  from  the  moving  flocks  and 
signalled  truce  to  chase.  He  broke  for  it  with 
wide  panting  bounds  and  many  a  missed  step 
picked  up  with  incredible  eagerness,  the  thin 
rim  of  his  nostrils  oozing  blood.  The  coyotes 
saw  and  closed  in  about  him,  chopping  quick 
and  hard.  Sharp  ears  and  sharp  muzzles  cast 
up  at  his  throat,  and  were  whelmed  in  a  press 
of  gray  flanks.  One  yelped,  one  went  limping 
from  a  kick,  and  one  went  past  him,  returning 
with  a  spring  upon  the  heaving  shoulder,  and 
the  man  in  the  reeds  beside  the  bitter  water  rose 
up  and  fired. 

77 


LOST   BORDERS 

All  the  luck  of  that  day's  hunting  went  to  the 
homesteader,  for  he  had  killed  an  antelope  and 
a  coyote  with  one  shot,  and  though  he  had  a 
bad  quarter  of  an  hour  with  a  wild  and  loathly 
shepherd,  who  he  feared  might  denounce  him 
to  the  law,  in  the  end  he  made  off  with  the  last 
antelope,  swung  limp  and  graceless  across  his 
shoulder.  The  coyotes  came  back  to  the  kill 
ing-ground  when  they  had  watched  him  safely 
down  the  ravine,  and  were  consoled  with  what 
they  found.  As  they  pulled  the  body  of  the 
dead  leader  about  before  they  began  upon  it, 
they  noticed  that  the  homesteader  had  taken 
the  ears  of  that  also. 

Little  Pete  lay  in  the  grass  and  wept  simply ; 
the  tears  made  pallid  traces  in  the  season's 
grime.  He  suffered  the  torture,  the  question 
extraordinary  of  bereavement.  If  he  had  not 
lingered  so  long  in  the  meadow  of  Los  Robles, 
if  he  had  moved  faster  on  the  Sand  Flat  trail — 
but,  in  fact,  he  had  come  up  against  the  in 
evitable.  He  had  been  breathed  upon  by  that 
spirit  which  goes  before  cities  like  an  exhalation 
and  dries  up  the  gossamer  and  the  dew. 

From  that  day  the  heart  had  gone  out  of  the 
Ceriso.  It  was  a  desolate  hollow,  reddish-hued 
and  dim,  with  brackish  waters,  and  moreover 

78 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

the  feed  was  poor.  His  eyes  could  not  forget 
their  trick  of  roving  the  valley  at  all  hours ;  he 
looked  by  the  rill  of  the  spring  for  hoof-prints 
that  were  not  there. 

Fronting  the  west  gap  there  was  a  spot  where 
he  would  not  feed,  where  the  grass  stood  up 
stiff  and  black  with  what  had  dried  upon  it. 
He  kept  the  flocks  to  the  ridgy  slopes  where  the 
limited  horizon  permitted  one  to  believe  the 
crater  was  not  quite  empty.  His  heart  shook 
in  the  night  to  hear  the  long-drawn  hunting 
howl,  and  shook  again  remembering  that  he 
had  nothing  to  be  fearing  for.  After  three 
weeks  he  passed  out  on  the  other  side  and  came 
that  way  no  more.  The  juniper -tree  stood 
greenly  by  the  spring  until  the  homesteader  cut 
it  down  for  firewood.  Nothing  taller  than  the 
rattling  reeds  stirs  in  all  the  hollow  of  the 
Ceriso. 


There  was  a  man  once  who  skidded  through 
Lost  Borders  in  an  automobile  with  a  balloon 
silk  tent  and  a  folding  tin  bath-tub,  who 
wrote  some  cheerful  tales  about  that  country, 
mostly  untrue,  about  rattlesnakes  coiling  under 
men's  blankets  at  night,  to  afford  heroic  oc- 

79 


LOST   BORDERS 

casions  in  the  morning,  of  which  circum 
stance  seventeen  years'  residence  failed  to  fur 
nish  a  single  instance;  about  lost  mines  re 
discovered,  which  never  happens,  and  Indian 
maidens  of  such  surpassing  charm  that  men 
married  them  and  went  out  of  the  story  with 
intimations  of  ever-after  happiness  due  to 
arrive.  It  is  true  I  did  know  a  man  who  mar 
ried  his  mahala,  but  he  was  mighty  sorry  for 
it,  and  though  it  lost  him  his  chance  in  life  the 
story  is  not  worth  telling. 

The  fact  is  that  only  when  men  struggle  with 
men  do  you  get  triumphs  and  rejoicings.  In 
any  conflict  with  the  immutable  forces  the 
human  is  always  the  under  dog,  and  when  the 
struggle  is  sharp  enough  to  be  dramatic,  he 
wins  death  mostly;  happiest  if  he  gets  out  of 
it  some  dignity  for  himself  and  some  sweetness 
for  his  friends  to  remember.  I  was  a  long  time 
understanding  why  a  great  many  people  can 
not  abide  a  story  with  death  in  it.  To  be 
snatched  at  the  dramatic  moment,  to  be  re- 
absorbed  in  the  vastness  of  space  and  the 
infinitude  of  silences,  to  return  simply  to  the 
native  essences— that  is  nothing  to  make  moan 
about;  but  when  I  had  once  taken  part  in  a 
proper  Christian  funeral,  after  fifteen  years 

80 


THE   LAST   ANTELOPE 

without  witnessing  one  such,  I  was  less  sur 
prised  at  it. 

When  one  has  to  think  of  death  in  connec 
tion  with  strange  tiptoeing  men  felicitating 
themselves  on  millinery  effects,  with  the  sug 
gestion  of  what  was  to  be  charged  for  it  lurk 
ing  under  the  discreetly  dropped  lids,  and  all 
the  obvious  mechanism  of  modern  burial,  one 
can  understand  that  what  happened  at  Agua 
Dulce  is  quite  another  matter. 


. 


VII 

AGUA    DULCE 

THE  Los  Angeles  special  got  in  so  late  that 
day  that  if  the  driver  of  the  Mojave  stage  had 
not,  from  having  once  gone  to  school  to  me, 
acquired  the  habit  of  minding  what  I  said,  I 
should  never  have  made  it.  I  hailed  him  from 
the  station,  and  he  swung  the  four  about  in 
the  wide  street  as  the  wind  swept  me  toward 
the  racked  old  coach  in  a  blinding  whirl  of 
dust. 

It  wrapped  my  skirts  about  the  iron  gear  of 
the  coach  as  I  climbed  to  the  seat  beside  the 
driver,  and  as  we  dropped  the  town  behind  us, 
lifted  my  hat  and  searched  out  my  hairpins. 
But  it  was  the  desert  wind,  and  the  smell  it 
carried  was  the  smell  of  marrow-fat  weed  and 
gilias  after  the  sun  goes  down;  so,  because  I 
had  been  very  unhappy  away  from  it,  and  was 
now  drunk  with  the  joy  of  renewal,  and  as  in 

82 


AGUA   DULCE 

my  case  there  would  be  no  time  for  a  toilet 
proper  to  the  road  until  we  came  to  the  Eigh 
teen-mile  house,  I  was  satisfied  merely  to  cling 
to  the  pitching  front  of  the  coach  and  let  the 
wind  do  what  it  would.  (The  sky  was  alight 
and  saffron-tinted,  the  mountains  bloomed  with 
violet  shadows;  as  we  came  whirling  by  the 
point  of  Dead-Man,  we  saw  the  wickiups  of  the 
Paiutes  and  the  little  hearth-fires  all  awink 
among  the  sage.  ^  They  had  a  look  of  home. 

''There's  some,"  said  the  driver  to  the  desert 
at  large,  "that  thinks  Indians  ain't  properly 
folks,  but  just  a  kind  of  cattle."  Then,  as  we 
jolted  forward  in  a  chuck,  he  swore  deeply  and 
brought  the  team  about,  putting  back  my  in 
stinctive  motion  to  steady  the  lurching  stage 
with  a  gesture  so  sharp  and  repellant  that  I 
sat  up  suddenly  in  offence. 

"Don't  you  go  for  to  mind  me,"  he  said, 
only  half  mindful  himself  of  what  he  had  done, 
and  went  on  staring  after  the  hearth-fires  of 
the  Paiutes.  By  which  I  knew  there  was  a 
story  there  that  had  something  to  do  with  the 
twilight  fires  and  the  homey  look  of  the  little 
huts.  Hours  later,  when  we  came  out  on  the 
mesa  above  Red  Rock,  white  star-froth  fleck 
ing  the  black  vault  over  us,  and  the  road  white 

7  83 


LOST   BORDERS 

between  the  miles  of  low  black  sage  before,  we 
had  got  to  this  point  in  it. 

"It  was  out  there,"  he  said,  waving  his  whip 
toward  the  gulf  of  blackness,  ' '  when  I  was  doin' 
assessment  work  for  McKenna,  nigh  to  the 
end  of  nowhere,  I  ...  took  up  with  an  Indian 
woman."  He  hurried  past  this  admission  with 
intent  to  cover  it  from  possible  reproach,  tell 
ing  how  McKenna  had  dumped  him  with  three 
months'  grub  by  a  water- hole  called  Agua  Dulce, 
distant  a  mile  or  two  from  the  claims  he  was 
expected  to  work. 

"Because,"  he  said,  "it  was  cheaper  than 
packin'  water,  me  bein*  alone,  and  McKenna, 
for  some  reason,  I  never  rightly  guessed,  keen 
to  keep  the  business  on  the  quiet.  McKenna 
would  be  visitin'  me  once  a  month  or  so, 
and  I  'lowed  I  wouldn't  lonesome  much,"  he 
laughed,  "and  I  didn't  after  I  ...  took  up  with 
Catameneda. 

' '  Seems  like  white  women  can't  get  to  under 
stand  why  a  man  takes  up  with  a  mahala. 
They  think  it's  just  badness,  and  so  they're 
down  on  it  ...  Maybe  it  is  with  some  .  .  .  but 
not  when  they  are  like  .  .  .  like  me  ...  and 
Catameneda.  .  .  .  There's  something  away  down 
in  a  man  that  his  own  women  folks  never 

84 


AGUA   DULCE 

understand  .  .  .  an'  you  spend  all  your  life  try 
ing  to  keep  them  from  understanding  .  .  . 
though  when  there's  one  that  does  she  plays 
hell  with  you.  ...  It  ain't  badness.  ...  I  don't 
know  rightly  what,  only  it  ain't  all  bad  .  .  .  but 
Catameneda  .  .  .  she  understood  .  .  .  and  I 
was  glad  to  have  her." 

The  wind  died  along  the  sage,  and  there 
was  no  sound  under  heaven  louder  than  the 
gride  of  the  wheels  and  the  clink  of  the  harness, 
chains.  Presently  he  returned  upon  his  track 
to  say  that  he  had  been  a  month  at  Agua  Dulce, 
going  and  returning  from  the  mines  each  day 
to  his  little  camp  kit,  laid  under  a  square  of 
canvas  with  stones  upon  it  to  keep  it  from  the 
wind.  He  had  cached  the  bulk  of  his  supplies 
behind  the  spring,  and  congratulated  himself 
on  it  when  at  the  close  of  one  day  he  found  a 
camp  of  Indians  at  Agua  Dulce. 

"You  know  how  it  is  with  these  desert  tribes," 
said  the  stage-driver:  "every  camp  looks  as  if 
it  might  have  been  there  for  a  hundred  years, 
and  when  they  go  there's  no  more  left  than  a 
last  year's  bird-nest.  They  just  scramble  up 
out  of  nothing  and  melt  away  in  the  sand  like 
a  horned  toad.  But  they  was  friendly  .  .  .  sort 
of  ...  when  you  got  to  know  them  .  .  .  and  the 

85 


LOST    BORDERS 

men  talked  English  considerable.  .  .  .  Evenings 
when  a  kind  of  creepy  chill  comes  on,  they  get 
around  their  litttle  fires  and  crack  their  jokes 
.  .  .  good  jokes,  too  .  .  .  there  was  one  old  buck 
real  comical,  ...  he  used  to  explain  them  in 
English  afterward.  And  when  they  sang  their 
songs  .  .  .  when  the  fires  were  lit  and  the  voices 
came  out  of  the  dark,  and  you  couldn't  see  the 
dirt  nor  the  color  of  their  skins,  you  would 
sort  of  forget  they  wasn't  your  own  folks. 

"And  so,"  he  said,  after  a  longer  silence, 
"when  the  camp  went  on  another  pasear  .  .  . 
Catameneda  .  .  .  she  stayed."  That  was  all  I 
was  ever  to  know  of  that  phase  of  it.  "Cata 
meneda  stayed."  That  and  the  flicker  in  his 
voice  cast  up  from  the  things  in  him  that  only 
the  Indian  woman  could  understand,  that  lit 
the  situation  through  his  scanty  speech  like  the 
glow  of  those  vanished  fires. 

' '  It  was  a  sort  of  pretty  place  at  Agua  Dulce," 
said  he.  "The  spring  came  out  from  the  black 
rock  into  a  basin  with  a  gurgly  sound.  There 
was  a  pink  flowering  bush  behind  it,  and  a 
smitch  of  green  where  it  ran  over  into  the  sand 
.  .  .  and  the  rest  was  sage-bush,  little  and  low ; 
and  crumply,  colored  hills.  There  were  doves 
came  and  built  in  the  flowering  shrubs,  for  they 

86 


AGUA    DULCE 

hadn't  no  fear  of  man  .  .  .  and  'Maneda,  she  fed 
them." 

He  was  silent,  letting  his  whip-lash  trail  out 
side  in  the  sand,  and  I  had  a  long  time  in  which 
to  consider  how  young  he  was,  and  how  much 
younger  he  must  have  been  when  he  drank 
sweet  water  out  there  at  Agua  Dulce,  before  he 
began  again. 

"She  was  mighty  lovin',"  he  said;  and  sud 
denly  I  saw  the  whole  tale  as  I  had  constructed 
it  ahead  of  his  halting  speech  fall  apart,  and 
rebuild  itself  to  a  larger  plan  as  he  went  on  to 
say  how,  when  he  came  from  the  mine  at  night 
and  had  no  caress  for  her,  she  would  begin  to 
droop  and  to  grieve,  to  flood  with  tears  and 
heavy  sobbing  like  a  hurt  child,  which  he  could 
still  in  a  moment  with  a  hand  upon  her  hair ;  and 
how  he  would  pretend  a  harshness  at  times  to  see 
her  flash  and  glow  with  the  assurance  of  tender 
ness  renewed,  which  he  laughed  at  her  for  never 
learning.  Sweet  water,  indeed,  at  Agua  Dulce! 

By  this  I  knew  the  story  had  come  to  some 
uncommon  end  that  lifted  it  beyond  the  vulgar 
adventure  of  satiety  and  desertion,  for  there 
was  no  yellowness  in  the  boy  that  he  should 
blab  upon  the  tenderness  of  women.  There 
was  a  good  hour  yet  until  we  came  to  Coyote 

87 


LOST   BORDERS 

Holes,  and  I  meant  to  have  it  all  out  of  him 
by  then.  The  end  had  come  very  quickly.  It 
began  in  their  growing  careless  through  happi 
ness  and  neglecting  the  cache.  Then  one  day, 
when  he  was  at  the  mine,  and  Catameneda 
setting  snares  for  quail  in  the  black  rock,  a 
thieving  prospector  rifled  it  and  left  them  wo- 
fully  short  of  food.  Five  days  of  desertness  lay 
between  them  and  any  possible  base  of  supplies, 
and  McKenna  was  not  due  until  the  twenty- 
ninth.  They  took  stock  and  decided  to  hold 
out  on  short  rations  until  he  came.  They  were 
very  merry  about  it,  being  so  young,  and 
Catameneda  knew  the  way  to  piece  out  their 
fare  with  roots  and  herbs.  She  promised  him 
he  should  learn  to  eat  lizards  yet,  as  Indians 
do.  And  then  suddenly  the  boy  fell  sick  of  a 
dysentery  which  he  thought  might  have  come 
from  some  mistaken  economy  of  Catameneda 's 
in  the  matter  of  canned  food;  and  while  he 
was  prostrated  with  that  came  the  sand-storm. 
The  girl  had  sensed  it,  Indian  fashion,  days  be 
fore  it  came,  but  he  was  loggy  with  weakness 
and  the  want  of  proper  care,  and  let  her  warn 
ing  pass.  Then  came  a  night  of  gusty  flaws; 
the  morning  showed  a  wall  of  yellow  cloud  ad 
vancing  from  the  south. 

88 


AGUA    DULCE 

All  that  country  around  Agua  Dulce  is  solid 
rock  and  fluctuant  sand  that  moves  before  the 
wind  with  a  small,  shrill  rustle,  and  no  trail  can 
lie  in  it  when  the  wind  blows  more  than  twenty- 
four  hours.  On  this  occasion  it  blew  for  three 
days. 

"Time  was,"  said  the  driver,  "I'd  lie  awake 
nights  to  mill  it  over  and  over.  Times  I'd 
think  I  could  have  done  better,  times  again  I 
didn't  know  as  I  could.  I  was  too  sick  to 
think  much,  and  'Maneda  was  mighty  uneasy, 
all  for  gettin'  forward  on  the  trail  to  meet 
McKenna,  who  would  be  comin'  toward  us. 
She  calculated  he  would  stop  at  Beeman's  till 
the  storm  was  past,  not  knowin'  we  were  short. 
And  the  wind  would  blow  three  days.  I  don't 
know  how  she  knew,  but  she  knew.  She  kept 
holding  up  her  fingers  to  show  me  how  many 
days,  and  forgetting  what  English  I  had  taught 
her ;  and  between  that  and  me  being  fair  locoed 
with  sickness,  I  gave  in.  I  don't  know  if  we 
wouldn't  have  done  better  to  stick  it  out  at 
Agua  Dulce.  And,  again,  I  don't  know  as  we 
would." 

They  took  the  canteen  and  such  food  as  they 
had  and  set  out  for  the  next  water-hole;  by 
noon  the  sand-storm  overtook  them.  The 

89 


LOST    BORDERS 

push  of  the  wind  was  steady,  and  they  tacked 
along  the  edge  of  it  without  too  much  dis 
comfort.  The  boy  was  pitifully  weak,  and 
Catameneda  laughed  as  she  braced  him  with 
her  firm,  young  body.  The  dark  fell  early,  the 
wind  increased  and  roared  against  them;  the 
boy,  chilled  in  the  night,  grew  feverish,  and 
Catameneda  was  reduced  to  hiding  the  canteen 
to  save  their  scanty  drink.  By  all  counts  they 
should  have  reached  the  first  water-hole  that 
day,  but  did  not  until  the  next  noon.  And  the 
storm  had  been  before  them.  The  sand  lay 
clean  white  and  drifted  smooth  over  all  that 
place.  Come  another  winter,  the  spring  would 
work  its  way  to  the  surface  perhaps,  but  now 
they  could  not  so  much  as  guess  where  to  dig 
for  it.  They  walked  on  and  on,  Catameneda 
leading  with  his  hand  in  hers.  This  day  they 
faced  the  wind.  The  girl's  hair  blew  back,  and 
he  held  it  to  his  eyes  to  shield  them  from  the 
tormenting  sting  of  the  sand.  The  water  and 
food  held  out  better  than  he  expected. 

He  said  that  he  thought  Catameneda  must 
have  waked  him  in  the  night,  when  there  was 
a  lull  in  the  wind,  for  he  seemed  to  remember 
crawling  long  distances  on  hands  and  knees, 
and  other  times  he  leaned  upon  her  body  and 

QO 


CATAMENEDA     LAUGHED     AS     SHE     BRACED     HIM     WITH 
HER     FIRM     YOUNG      BODY 


AGUA    DULCE 

heard  her  voice,  but  did  not  seem  to  see  her. 
Always  they  travelled  in  a  fury  of  wind  and  a 
biting  smother  of  sand. 

"I  don't  know  how  'Maneda  pulled  me 
through, ' '  he  said,  ' '  but  she  did.  All  I  remem 
ber  was  the  beginning  of  the  basalt  wall  at  the 
root  of  Black  Mountain,  and  right  away  after 
that  the  drip  of  the  spring,  though  it's  two  mile 
from  where  the  rock  begins.  I  was  long  past 
bein'  hungry,  but  I  jest  naturally  wallowed 
in  that  water,  and  it  ain't  any  great  water 
neither,  not  like  the  water  at  Agua  Dulce.  But 
Catameneda  she  didn't  seem  to  care  for  none." 

He  paused  so  long  here  that  if  I  had  not 
known  his  kind  very  well,  I  should  have  thought 
it  all  the  story  he  meant  to  let  me  have ;  but  at 
last: 

"I  reckon  I  was  light-headed,"  he  said, 
"else  I  should  have  sensed  what  was  the  mat 
ter;  but  I  don't  know  but  it  was  best  as  it  was. 
I  couldn't  have  done  nothin'.  We  lay  on  the 
sand  far  spent  and  sick,  the  wind  was  going 
down,  and  we  could  breathe  better  under  the 
wall.  I  heard  her  kind  of  choke  up  every  lit 
tle,  and  by-and-by  she  was  talking  quiet  like, 
in  her  own  language,  and  I  made  out  she 
wanted  her  mother  .  .  .  she  wasn't  more  than 

91 


LOST   BORDERS 

seventeen,  I  should  think.  ...  It  was  cold,  too, 
and  I'd  lost  my  blanket  somewhere  back  on 
the  trail,  not  bein'  able  to  say  where.  ...  I 
snuggled  her  up  in  my  arms,  kind  of  shivery 
like  .  .  .  and  by-and-by  ...  she  knew  me,  puttin' 
her  hand  up  to  my  face,  a  way  she  had  .  .  .  and 
say  in'  in  English,  as  I  had  taught  her,  'Vera 
good  boy,  mucha  like.'  And  it  didn't  seem  no 
time  at  all  after  that  when  it  was  broad  morn 
ing  and  the  wind  was  down  .  .  .  her  hair  on  my 
face  .  .  .  and  she  was  heavy  on  my  arm. 

"  I  sat  up  and  laid  her  on  the  sand.  ...  It 
was  too  much  for  her  .  .  .  all  she  had  been 
through  .  .  .  bein'  so  young  .  .  .  and  she  had  given 
me  all  the  food  and  all  the  water  .  .  .  though  I 
hadn't  felt  to  know  it  before.  I  knew  it  as 
soon  as  I  looked  at  her  ...  I  reckon  she  had  a 
hemorrhage  or  something  .  .  .  there  was  blood 
on  her  face  and  sleeves  like  she  wiped  it  from 
her  mouth." 

Out  in  the  blackness  toward  Agua  Dulce  a 
coyote  howled  and  night  freshened  for  a  sign 
of  morning. 

"McKenna  came  through  by  noon,  and  we 
buried  her,"  he  finished,  simply,  "under  a  pink 
flowering  bush,  because  she  loved  it.  I  worked 
on  a  ranch  in  the  valley  for  two  years  after 

92 


AGUA   DULCE 

that.  ...  I  couldn't  seem  to  abide  the  desert 
for  a  spell  .  .  .  nor  the  little  fires  .  .  .  but  I  got 
over  that  .  .  .  you  know  how  that  is." 

"Yes,  I  know  how  that  is." 

"But  I  don't  suppose  anybody  knows,"  he 
went,  on,  reflectively,  "how  it  is  that  I  don't 
think  of  her  dead  any  more,  nor  any  of  that 
hard  time  we  had  .  .  .  only  sometimes  when  it's 
spring  like  this,  and  I  smell  sage-brush  burning 
...  it  reminds  me  ...  of  some  loving  way  she 
had  out  there  ...  at  Agua  Dulce." 


A  man's  story  like  that  is  always  so  much 
more  satisfactory  because  he  tells  you  all  the 
story  there  is,  what  happened  to  him,  and  how 
he  felt  about  it,  supposing  his  feelings  are  any 
part  of  the  facts  in  the  case ;  but  with  a  woman 
it  is  not  so.  She  never  knows  much  about  her 
feelings,  unless  they  are  pertinent  to  the  story, 
and  then  she  leaves  them  out. 


VIII 
THE   WOMAN   AT   THE   EIGHTEEN-MILE 

I  HAD  long  wished  to  write  a  story  of  Death 
1  Valley  that  should  be  its  final  word.  It  was 
to  be  so  chosen  from  the  limited  sort  of  in 
cidents  that  could  occur  there,  so  charged  with 
the  still  ferocity  of  its  moods  that  I  should  at 
length  be  quit  of  its  obsession,  free  to  concern 
myself  about  other  affairs.  And  from  the  mo 
ment  of  hearing  of  the  finding  of  Lang's  body 
at  Dead  Man's  Spring  I  knew  I  had  struck  upon 
the  trail  of  that  story. 

It  was  a  teamster  who  told  it,  stopping  over 
the  night  at  McGee's,  a  big,  slow  man,  face  and 
features  all  of  a  bluntness,  as  if  he  had  been 
dropped  before  the  clay  was  set.  He  had  a 
big,  blunt  voice  through  which  his  words  rolled, 
dulled  along  the  edges.  The  same  accident  that 
had  flattened  the  outlines  of  his  nose  and  chin 
must  have  happened  to  his  mind,  for  he  was 

94 


THE   WOMAN   AT   THE   EIGHTEEN-MILE 

never  able  to  deliver  more  than  the  middle  of 
an  idea,  without  any  definiteness  as  to  where 
it  began  or  ended  and  what  it  stood  next  to. 
He  called  the  dead  man  Long,  and  failed  to 
remember  who  was  supposed  to  have  killed 
him,  and  what  about. 

We  had  fallen  a-talking  round  the  fire  of  Con 
vict  Lake,  and  the  teamster  had  handed  up 
the  incident  of  Dead  Man's  Spring  as  the  only 
thing  in  his  experience  that  matched  with  the 
rooted  horror  of  its  name.  He  had  been  of  the 
party  that  recovered  the  body,  and  what  had 
stayed  with  him  was  the  sheer  torment  of  the 
journey  across  Death  Valley,  the  aching  heat, 
the  steady,  sickening  glare,  the  uncertainty  as 
to  whether  there  was  a  body  in  the  obliterated 
grave,  whether  it  was  Lang's  body,  and  whether 
they  would  be  able  to  prove  it;  and  then  the 
exhuming  of  the  dead,  like  the  one  real  inci 
dent  in  a  fever  dream.  He  was  very  sure  of 
the  body,  done  up  in  an  Indian  blanket  striped 
red  and  black,  with  a  rope  around  it  like  a 
handle,  convenient  for  carrying.  But  he  had 
forgotten  what  set  the  incident  in  motion,  or 
what  became  of  Lang  after  that,  if  it  really 
were  Lang  in  the  blanket. 

Then   I  heard  of  the  story  again  between 
95 


LOST   BORDERS 

Red  Rock  and  Coyote  Holes,  about  moon-set, 
when  the  stage  labored  up  the  long  gorge, 
waking  to  hear  the  voices  of  the  passengers  run 
on  steadily  with  the  girding  of  the  sand  and 
the  rattle  of  harness-chains,  run  on  and  break 
and  eddy  around  Dead  Man's  Springs,  and 
back  up  in  turgid  pools  of  comment  and  specu 
lation,  falling  in  shallows  of  miner's  talk,  lost 
at  last  in  a  waste  of  ledges  and  contracts  and 
forgotten  strikes.  Waking  and  falling  asleep 
again,  the  story  shaped  itself  of  the  largeness 
of  the  night;  and  then  the  two  men  got  down 
at  Coyote  Holes  an  hour  before  dawn,  and  I 
knew  no  more  of  them,  neither  face  nor  name. 
But  what  I  had  heard  of  the  story  confirmed  it 
exactly,  the  story  I  had  so  long  sought. 

Those  who  have  not  lived  in  a  mining  country 
cannot  understand  how  it  is  possible  for  whole 
communities  to  be  so  disrupted  by  the  failure 
of  a  lode  or  a  fall  in  the  price  of  silver,  that  I 
could  live  seven  years  within  a  day's  journey 
of  Dead  Man's  Spring  and  not  come  upon  any 
body  who  could  give  me  the  whole  of  that 
story.  I  went  about  asking  for  it,  and  got 
sticks  and  straws.  There  was  a  man  who  had 
kept  bar  in  Tio  Juan  at  the  time,  and  had  been 
the  first  to  notice  Whitmark's  dealing  with  the 

96 


THE  WOMAN   AT   THE   EIGHTEEN-MILE 

Shoshone  who  was  supposed  to  have  stolen  the 
body  after  it  was  dug  up.  There  was  a  Mexican 
who  had  been  the  last  to  see  Lang  alive  and 
might  have  told  somewhat,  but  death  got  him 
before  I  did.  Once,  at  a  great  dinner  in  San 
Francisco,  a  large,  positive  man  with  a  square 
forehead  and  a  face  below  it  that  somehow 
implied  he  had  shaped  it  so  butting  his  way 
through  life,  across  the  table  two  places  down, 
caught  at  some  word  of  mine,  leaning  forward 
above  the  bank  of  carnations  that  divided  the 
cloth. 

"Queer  thing  happened  up  in  that  country 
to  a  friend  of  mine,  Whitmark — "  But  the 
toast-master  cut  him  off.  All  this  time  the 
story  glimmered  like  a  summer  island  in  a 
mist,  through  every  man's  talk  about  it,  grew 
and  allured,  caressing  the  soul.  It  had  warmth 
and  amplitude,  like  a  thing  palpable  to  be 
stroked.  There  was  a  mine  in  it,  a  murder  and 
a  mystery,  great  sacrifice,  Shoshones,  dark  and 
incredibly  discreet,  and  the  magnetic  will  of  a 
man  making  manifest  through  all  these;  there 
were  lonely  water-holes,  deserted  camps  where 
coyotes  hunted  in  the  streets,  fatigues  and 
dreams  and  voices  of  the  night.  And  at  the 
last  it  appeared  there  was  a  woman  in  it. 

97 


LOST    BORDERS 

Curiously,  long  before  I  learned  of  her  con 
nection  with  the  story,  I  had  known  and  liked 
her  for  a  certain  effect  she  had  of  being  warmed 
and  nourished  from  within.  There  was  about 
her  a  spark,  a  nuance  that  men  mistook — never 
more  than  once,  as  the  stage-driver  told  me 
confidently — a  vitality  that  had  nothing,  abso 
lutely  nothing,  but  the  blank  occasionless  life 
of  the  desert  to  sustain  it.  She  was  one  of  the 
very  few  people  I  had  known  able  to  keep  a 
soul  alive  and  glowing  in  the  wilderness,  and  I 
was  to  find  out  that  she  kept  it  so  against  the 
heart  of  my  story.  Mine!  I  called  it  so  by 
that  time;  but  hers  was  the  right,  though  she 
had  no  more  pertinence  to  the  plot  than  most 
women  have  to  desert  affairs. 

She  was  the  Woman  of  the  Eighteen-Mile 
House.  She  had  the  desert  mark  upon  her— 
lean  figure,  wasted  bosom,  the  sharp,  upright 
furrow  between  the  eyes,  the  burned,  tawny 
skin,  with  the  pallid  streak  of  the  dropped 
eyelids,  and  of  course  I  suppose  she  knew  her 
husband  from  among  the  lean,  sidling,  vacuous- 
looking  Borderers;  but  I  couldn't  have  identi 
fied  him,  so  like  he  was  to  the  other  feckless 
men  whom  the  desert  sucks  dry  and  keeps 
dangling  like  gourds  on  a  string.  Twenty-five 


THE   WOMAN    AT   THE   EIGHTEEN-MILE 

years  they  had  drifted  from  up  Bodie  way, 
around  Panimint,  toward  Mojave,  worse  housed 
and  fed  than  they  might  have  been  in  the 
ploughed  lands,  and  without  having  hit  upon 
the  fortune  which  is  primarily  the  object  of 
every  desert  adventure.  And  when  people  have 
been  as  long  as  that  among  the  Lost  Borders 
there  is  not  the  slightest  possibility  of  their 
coming  to  anything  else.  And  still  the  Woman's 
soul  was  palpitant  and  enkindled.  At  the  last, 
Mayer — that  was  the  husband's  name — had 
settled  at  the  Eighteen-Mile  House  to  care  for 
the  stage  relays,  and  I  had  met  the  Woman, 
halting  there  with  the  stage  or  camping  nights 
on  some  slower  passage. 

At  the  time  I  learned  of  her  connection  with 
the  Whitmark  affair,  the  story  still  wanted 
some  items  of  motive  and  understanding,  a 
knowledge  of  the  man  himself,  some  account  of 
his  three  months'  pasear  into  the  hills  beyond 
Mesquite,  which  certainly  had  to  do  with  the 
affair  of  the  mine,  but  of  which  he  would  never 
be  persuaded  to  speak.  And  I  made  perfectly 
sure  of  getting  the  rest  of  it  from  the  Woman 
at  the  Eighteen-Mile. 

It  was  full  nine  o'clock  before  the  Woman's 
household  was  all  settled  and  she  had  come  out 
s  99 


LOST   BORDERS 

upon  the  stoop  of  the  Eighteen-Mile  House  to 
talk,  the  moon  coming  up  out  of  Shoshone 
land,  all  the  hollow  of  the  desert  falling  away 
before  us,  filled  with  the  glitter  of  that  sur 
passing  wonder,  the  moon-mirage.  Never  mind 
what  went  before  to  draw  her  to  the  point 
of  talking;  it  could  have  come  about  as  sim 
ply  as  my  saying,  "I  mean  to  print  this  story 
as  I  find  it,"  and  she  would  have  had  to  talk 
to  save  it.  Consider  how  still  it  was.  Off  to 
the  right  the  figures  of  my  men  under  their 
blankets  stretched  along  the  ground.  Not  a 
leaf  to  rustle,  not  a  bough  to  creak.  No  grass 
to  whisper  in  the  wind,  only  stiff,  scant  shrubs 
and  the  sandy  hills  like  shoals  at  the  bottom 
of  a  lake  of  light.  I  could  see  the  Woman's 
profile,  thin  and  fine  against  the  moon,  and 
when  she  put  up  her  hand  to  drag  down  the 
thick,  careless  coil  of  her  hair,  I  guessed  we 
were  close  upon  the  heart  of  the  story.  And 
for  her  the  heart  of  the  story  was  the  man, 
Whitmark. 

She  had  been,  at  the  time  he  came  into  the 
country  seventeen  years  before,  that  which  the 
world  knows  so  little  what  to  do  with  that  it 
mostly  throws  away — a  good  woman  with 
great  power  and  possibilities  of  passion.  Whit- 

100 


THE   WOMAN   AT  THE.  EIGHTEEN-MILE 

mark  stood  for  the  best  she  had  known,  I  should 
have  said  from  all  I  learned,  just  a  clean- 
minded,  acute,  tolerably  cultivated  American 
business  man  with  an  obsession  for  accom 
plishing  results. 

He  had  been  sent  out  to  look  after  a  mine  to 
which  the  title  was  not  clear,  and  there  were 
counter  -  machinations  to  take  it  away  from 
him.  This  much  may  be  told  without  breach, 
for,  as  it  turned  out,  I  was  not  to  write  that 
story,  after  all;  at  least,  not  in  the  lifetime  of 
the  Woman  at  the  Eighteen-Mile.  And  the 
crux  of  the  story  to  her  was  one  little,  so  little, 
moment,  that  owing  to  Whitmark's  having 
been  taken  with  pneumonia  within  a  week 
afterward,  was  rendered  fixed  beyond  change 
or  tarnish  of  time. 

When  all  this  was  going  forward  the  Mayers 
kept  a  miner's  boarding-house  at  Tio  Juan, 
where  Whitmark  was  in  and  out;  and  the 
Woman,  who  from  the  first  had  been  attracted 
by  the  certain  stamp  of  competency  and  power, 
began  to  help  him  with  warnings,  intimations 
of  character  and  local  prejudice,  afterward  with 
information  which  got  him  the  reputation  of 
almost  supernatural  penetration. 

There  were  reasons  why,  during  his  darkest 
101 


LOST'S&RDERS 

time,  Whitmark  could  find  nobody  but  the 
Indians  and  the  Woman  to  trust.  Well,  he 
had  been  wise  enough  to  trust  her,  and  it  was 
plain  to  see  from  her  account  of  it  that  this 
was  the  one  occasion  in  life  when  her  soul  had 
stretched  itself,  observed,  judged,  wrought, 
and  felt  to  the  full  of  its  power. 

She  loved  him;  yes,  perhaps — I  do  not  know 
— if  you  call  love  that  soul  service  of  a  good 
woman  to  a  man  she  may  not  touch.  Whit- 
mark  had  children  back  East,  and  a  wife  whom 
he  had  married  for  all  the  traditions  of  nice- 
ness  and  denial  and  abnegation  which  men 
demand  of  the  women  they  expect  to  marry, 
and  find  savorless  so  often  when  they  are  mar 
ried  to  it.  He  had  never  known  what  it  meant 
to  have  a  woman  concerned  in  his  work,  run 
ning  neck  and  neck  with  it,  divining  his  need, 
supplementing  it  not  with  the  merely  feminine 
trick  of  making  him  more  complacent  with  him 
self,  but  with  vital  remedies  and  aids.  And 
once  he  had  struck  the  note  of  the  West,  he 
kindled  to  the  event  and  enlarged  his  spirit. 
The  two  must  have  had  great  moments  at 
the  heart  of  that  tremendous  coil  of  circum 
stance.  All  this  the  Woman  conveyed  to  me 
by  the  simplest  telling  of  the  story  as  it  hap- 
102 


THE   WOMAN   AT   THE   EIGHTEEN-MILE 

pened :     "I  said  .  .  .  and  he  did  .  .  .  the  Indian 
went .  .  ." 

I  sat  within  the  shallow  shadow  of  the  eaves 
experiencing  the  full-throated  satisfaction  of 
old  prospectors  over  the  feel  of  pay  dirt,  rub 
bing  it  between  the  thumb  and  palm,  swearing 
over  it  softly  below  the  breath.  It  was  as  good 
as  that.  And  I  was  never  to  have  it!  For 
one  thing  the  Woman  made  plain  to  me  in 
the  telling  was  the  guilt  of  Whitmark.  Though 
there  was  no  evidence  by  which  the  court  could 
hold  him,  though  she  did  not  believe  it,  though 
the  fulness  of  her  conviction  intrigued  me  into 
believing  that  it  did  not  matter  so  much  what 
he  was — the  only  way  to  write  that  story  suc 
cessfully  was  to  fix  forever  against  Whitmark's 
name  its  damning  circumstance.  The  affair 
had  been  a  good  deal  noised  about  at  the  time, 
and  through  whatever  illusion  of  altered  name 
and  detail,  was  bound  to  be  recognized  and 
made  much  of  in  the  newspapers.  The  Woman 
of  the  Eighteen-Mile  saw  that.  Suddenly  she 
broke  off  the  telling  to  show  me  her  poor  heart, 
shrivelling  as  I  knew  hearts  to  warp  and  shrink 
in  the  aching  wilderness,  this  one  occasion  ren 
dering  it  serviceable  like  a  hearth-fire  in  an 
empty  room. 

103 


LOST    BORDERS 

"It  was  a  night  like  this  he  went  away," 
said  the  Woman,  stirring  to  point  to  the  solemn 
moonlight  poured  over  all  the  world. 

That  was  after  twenty-two  months  of  strug 
gle  had  left  Whitmark  in  possession  of  the 
property.  He  was  on  his  way  then  to  visit 
his  family,  whom  he  had  seen  but  once  in  that 
time,  and  was  to  come  again  to  put  in  opera 
tion  the  mine  he  had  so  hardly  won.  It  was, 
it  should  have  been,  an  hour  ripe  with  satis 
faction. 

"He  was  to  take  the  stage  which  passed 
through  Bitter  Wells  at  ten  that  night,"  said 
she,  "and  I  rode  out  with  him — he  had  asked 
me — from  Tio  Juan,  to  bring  back  the  horses. 
We  started  at  sunset  and  reached  the  Wells  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  before  the  time. 

"The  moon  was  half  high  \vhen  the  sun  went 
down,  and  I  was  very  happy,  because  it  had 
all  come  out  so  well,  and  he  was  to  come  again 
in  two  months.  We  talked  as  we  rode.  I  told 
you  he  was  a  cheerful  man.  All  the  time  when 
it  looked  as  if  he  might  be  tried  for  his  life, 
the  worse  it  looked  the  more  his  spirits  rose. 
He  would  have  laughed  if  he  had  heard  he 
was  to  be  hung.  But  that  night  there  was  a 
trouble  upon  him.  It  grew  as  we  rode.  His 
104 


THE   WOMAN   AT   THE    EIGHTEEN-MILE 

face  drew,  his  breath  came  sighing.  He  seemed 
always  on  the  point  of  speaking  and  did  not. 
It  was  as  if  he  had  something  to  say  that  must 
be  said,  and  at  the  moment  of  opening  his  lips 
it  escaped  him.  In  the  moonlight  I  saw  his 
mouth  working,  and  nothing  came  from  it.  If 
I  spoke  the  trouble  went  out  of  his  face,  and 
when  I  left  off  it  came  again,  puzzled  wonder 
and  pain.  I  know  now!"  said  the  Woman,  shak 
ing  forward  her  thick  hair,  ''that  it  was  a  warn 
ing,  a  presentiment.  I  have  heard  of  such 
things,  and  it  seems  as  if  I  should  have  felt  it 
too,  hovering  in  the  air  like  that.  But  I  was 
glad  because  it  had  all  come  out  so  well  and 
I  had  had  a  hand  in  it.  Besides,  it  was  not  for 
me."  She  turned  toward  me  then  for  the  first 
time,  her  hair  falling  forward  to  encompass  all 
her  face  but  the  eyes,  wistful  with  the  desire 
to  have  me  understand  how  fine  this  man  was 
in  every  worldly  point,  how  far  above  her,  and 
how  honored  she  was  to  have  been  the  witness 
of  the  intimation  of  his  destiny.  I  said  quickly 
the  thing  that  was  expected  of  me,  which  was 
not  the  thing  I  thought,  and  gave  her  courage 
for  going  on. 

"Yet,"  she  said,  "I  was  not  entirely  out  of 
it,  because — because  the  thing  he  said  at  the 


LOST    BORDERS 

last,  when  he  said  it,  did  not  seem  the  least 
strange  to  me,  though  afterward,  of  course, 
when  I  thought  of  it,  it  was  the  strangest  good 
bye  I  had  ever  heard. 

"We  had  got  down  and  stood  between  the 
horses,  and  the  stage  was  coming  in.  We 
heard  the  sand  fret  under  it,  and  the  moon 
light  was  a  cold  weight  laid  upon  the  world. 
He  took  my  hand  and  held  it  against  his  breast 
so — and  said —  Oh,  I  am  perfectly  sure  of 
the  words;  he  said,  'I  have  missed  you  so.' 
Just  that,  not  good-bye,  and  not  shall  miss 
you,  but  'I  have  missed  you  so. ' 

"Like  that,"  she  said,  her  hands  still  clasped 
above  her  wasted  bosom,  the  quick  spirit  glow 
ing  through  it  like  wine  in  a  turgid  glass — 
"like  that,"  she  said.  But,  no;  whatever  the 
phrase  implied  of  the  failure  of  the  utterly  safe 
and  respectable  life  to  satisfy  the  inmost  hun 
ger  of  the  man,  it  could  never  have  had  in  it 
the  pain  of  her  impassioned,  lonely  years.  If 
it  had  been  the  one  essential  word  the  Desert 
strives  to  say  it  would  have  been  pronounced 
like  that. 

"And  it  was  not  until  the  next  day,"  she 
went  on,  "it  occurred  to  me  that  was  a  strange 
thing  to  say  to  a  woman  he  had  seen  two  or 
T  06 


THE   WOMAN   AT   THE    EIGHTEEN-MILE 

three  times  a  week  for  nearly  two  years.  But 
somehow  it  seemed  to  me  clearer  when  I  heard 
a  week  later  that  he  was  dead.  He  had  taken 
cold  on  the  way  home,  and  died  after  three 
days.  His  wife  wrote  me;  it  was  a  very  nice 
letter;  she  said  he  told  her  I  had  been  kind  to 
him.  Kind ! ' '  She  broke  off,  and  far  out  under 
the  moon  rose  the  thin  howl  of  coyotes  running 
together  in  the  pack.  "And  that,"  said  the 
Woman,  "is  why  I  made  you  promise  at 
the  beginning  that  if  I  told  you  all  I  knew 
about  Whitmark  and  Lang  you  would  not 
use  it." 

I  jumped.  She  had  done  that,  and  I  had 
promised  light-heartedly.  People  nearly  al 
ways  exact  that  sort  of  an  assurance  in  the 
beginning  of  confidences,  like  a  woman  wanting 
to  be  told  she  is  of  nobler  courage  at  the  mo 
ment  of  committing  an  indiscretion,  a  con 
cession  to  the  sacredness  of  personal  experience 
which  always  seems  so  much  less  once  it  is 
delivered,  they  can  be  persuaded  to  forego  the 
promise  of  inviolateness.  I  always  promise  and 
afterward  persuade.  But  not  the  Woman  of  the 
Eighteen-Mile.  If  Whitmark  had  lived  he 
would  have  come  back  and  proved  his  worth, 
cleared  himself  by  his  life  and  works.  As  it 
107 


LOST    BORDERS 

stood,  by  the  facts  against  him,  he  was  most 
utterly  given  over  to  ill-repute.  The  singu 
larity  of  the  incident,  the  impossibility  of  its 
occurring  in  any  place  but  Death  Valley,  con 
spired  to  fix  the  ineffaceable  stain  upon  his 
wife  and  his  children,  for,  by  the  story  as  I 
should  write  it,  he  ought  to  have  been  hung. 
No  use  to  say  modestly  that  the  scratchings  of 
my  pen  would  never  reach  them.  If  it  were 
not  the  biggest  story  of  the  desert  ever  written, 
I  had  no  wish  to  write  it.  And  there  was  the 
Woman.  The  story  was  all  she  had,  absolutely 
all  of  heart-stretching,  of  enlargement  and  sus 
tenance.  What  she  thought  about  it  was  that 
that  last  lusive  moment  when  she  touched  the 
forecast  shadow  of  his  destiny  was  to  bind  her 
to  save  his  credit  for  his  children's  sake.  One 
must  needs  be  faithful  to  one's  experiences 
when  there  are  so  few  of  them. 

She  said  something  like  that,  gathering  up 
her  hair  in  both  hands,  standing  before  me  in 
the  wan  revealing  light.  The  mark  of  the 
desert  was  on  her.  Heart  of  desolation!  But 
I  knew  what  pinchings  of  the  spirit  went  to 
make  that  mark! 

"It  was  a  promise,"  she  said. 

"It  is  a  promise." 

108 


THE  WOMAN  AT  THE  EIGHTEEN-MILE 

But  I  caught  myself  in  the  reservation  that 
it  should  not  mean  beyond  the  term  of  her 
life. 


Every  now  and  then  arises  some  city-sur 
feited  demand  for  a  great  primitive  love- 
story:  it  is  usually  a  Professor  in  the  Eng 
lish  Department  or  some  young  man  on  the 
Daily  News  at  fifteen  per  who  dreams  of  writing 
it.  Only  those  who  have  learned  it  at  first 
hand  understand  that  there  is  no  such  thing; 
that  primitive  love  is  the  most  complaisant, 
that  is  to  say,  the  most  serviceable  to  Life  of 
all  human  passions. 

But  when  we  magnify  it  with  bonds  it  chafes 
itself  to  dramatic  proportions.  Love  is  Life's 
own  way  of  reducing  the  clash  of  human  con 
tacts  in  order  that  the  pair  may  turn  a  more 
opposing  front  to  the  adversary,  the  Wilderness. 

It  springs  up,  oh,  it  springs  up,  as  Life 
divinely  meant  it,  wherever,  in  the  press  of 
existence,  men  and  women  come  together;  re 
quires,  when  the  conditions  are  of  a  simpleness 
called  primitive,  no  other  inducement.  But  Life 
did  not  invent  Society,  seems  somehow  never 
to  be  properly  aware  of  it;  though  it  justifies 
109 


LOST    BORDERS 

itself  of  Love,  cannot  yet  square  with  Respect 
ability,  with  the  Church  and  Property.  Thread 
ing  through  these,  Love  weaves  the  fascinating 
intricacy  of  story,  but  here  in  the  Borders, 
where  the  warp  runs  loose  and  wide,  the  pattern 
has  not  that  richness  it  should  show  in  the 
close  fabric  of  civilization.  If  it  lived  next 
door  to  you,  you  probably,  wouldn't  have  any 
thing  to  do  with  it. 


PT 


IX 

HE 


WHENEVER  I  come  up  to  judgment,  and 
am  hard  pushed  to  make  good  on  my  own 
account  (as  I  expect  to  be)  ,  I  shall  mention  the 
case  of  Netta  Saybrick,  for  on  the  face  of  it, 
and  by  all  the  traditions  in  which  I  was  bred, 
I  behaved  rather  handsomely.  I  say  on  the 
face  of  it,  for  except  in  the  matter  of  keeping  my 
mouth  shut  afterward,  I  am  not  so  sure  I  had 
anything  to  do  with  the  affair.  It  was  one  of 
those  incidents  that  from  some  crest  of  sheer 
inexplicableness  seems  about  to  direct  the 
imagination  over  vast  tracts  of  human  experi 
ence,  only  to  fall  away  into  a  pit  of  its  own 
digging,  all  fouled  with  weed  and  sand.  But, 
by  keeping  memory  and  attention  fixed  on  its 
pellucid  instant  as  it  mounted  against  the  sun, 
I  can  still  see  the  Figure  shining  through  it  as 
I  saw  it  that  day  at  Posada,  with  the  glimmering 
in 


LOST   BORDERS 

rails  of  the  P.  and  S.  running  out  behind  it, 
thin  lines  of  light  toward  the  bar  of  Heaven. 

Up  till  that  time  Netta  Saybrick  had  never 
liked  me,  though  I  never  laid  it  to  any  other 
account  than  Netta's  being  naturally  a  little 
fool ;  af terward  she  explained  to  me  that  it  was 
because  she  thought  I  gave  myself  airs.  The 
Say  bricks  lived  in  the  third  house  from  mine, 
around  the  corner,  so  that  our  back  doors  over 
looked  each  other,  and  up  till  the  coming  of 
Doctor  Challoner  there  had  never  been  anything 
in  Netta's  conduct  that  the  most  censorious  of 
the  villagers  could  remark  upon.  Nor  after 
ward,  for  that  matter.  The  Saybricks  had  been 
married  four  years,  and  the  baby  was  about  two. 
He  was  not  an  interesting  child  to  anybody 
but  his  mother,  and  even  Netta  was  sometimes 
thought  to  be  not  quite  absorbed  in  him. 

Saybrick  was  a  miner,  one  of  the  best  drillers 
in  our  district,  and  consequently  away  from 
home  much  of  the  time.  Their  house  was 
rather  larger  than  their  needs,  and  Netta,  to 
avoid  loneliness  more  than  for  profit,  let  out  a 
room  or  two.  That  was  the  way  she  happened 
to  fall  into  the  hands  of  the  Fakir. 

Franklin  Challoner  had  begun  by  being  a 
brilliant  and  promising  student  of  medicine. 

112 


THE   FAKIR 

I  had  known  him  when  his  natural  gifts  proph 
esied  the  unusual,  but  I  had  known  him  rather 
better  than  most,  and  I  was  not  surprised  to 
have  him  turn  up  five  years  later  at  Maverick 
as  a  Fakir. 

It  had  begun  in  his  being  poor,  and  having 
to  work  his  way  through  the  Medical  College 
at  the  cost  of  endless  pains  and  mortification 
to  himself.  Like  most  brilliant  people,  Chal- 
loner  was  sensitive  and  had  an  enormous 
egotism,  and,  what  nearly  always  goes  with  it, 
the  faculty  of  being  horribly  fascinating  to 
women.  It  was  thought  very  creditable  of 
him  to  have  put  himself  through  college  at  his 
own  charge,  though  in  reality  it  proved  a  great 
social  waste.  I  have  a  notion  that  the  courage, 
endurance,  and  steadfastness  which  should  have 
done  Frank  Challoner  a  lifetime  was  squeezed 
out  of  him  by  the  stress  of  those  overworked, 
starved,  mortifying  years.  His  egotism  made 
it  important  to  his  happiness  to  keep  the  centre 
of  any  stage,  and  this  he  could  do  in  school  by 
sheer  brilliance  of  scholarship  and  the  distinc 
tion  of  his  struggles.  But  afterward,  when  he 
had  to  establish  himself  without  capital  among 
strangers,  he  found  himself  impoverished  of 
manliness.  Always  there  was  the  compelling 


LOST    BORDERS 

need  of  his  temperament  to  stand  well  with 
people,  and  almost  the  only  means  of  accomplish 
ing  it  his  poverty  allowed  was  the  dreadful 
facility  with  which  he  made  himself  master  of 
women.  I  suppose  this  got  his  real  ability  dis 
credited  among  his  professional  fellows.  Be 
tween  that  and  the  sharp  need  of  money,  and 
the  incredible  appetite  which  people  have  for 
being  fooled,  somewhere  in  the  Plateau  of 
Fatigue  between  promise  and  accomplishment, 
Frank  Challoner  lost  himself.  Therefore,  I  was 
not  surprised  when  he  turned  up  finally  at 
Maverick,  lecturing  on  phrenology,  and  from 
the  shape  of  their  craniums  advising  country 
people  of  their  proper  careers  at  three  dollars  a 
sitting.  He  advertised  to  do  various  things  in 
the  way  of  medical  practice  that  had  a  dubious 
sound. 

It  was  court  week  when  he  came,  and  the 
only  possible  lodging  to  be  found  at  Netta 
Saybrick's.  Doctor  Challoner  took  the  two 
front  rooms  as  being  best  suited  to  his  clients 
and  himself,  and  I  believe  he  did  very  well. 
I  was  not  particularly  pleased  to  see  him,  on 
account  of  having  known  him  before,  not  wish 
ing  to  prosecute  the  acquaintance;  and  about 
that  time  Indian  George  brought  me  word  that 
114 


THE   FAKIR 

a  variety  of  redivivus  long  sought  was  blooming 
that  year  on  a  certain  clayey  tract  over  toward 
Waban.  It  was  not  supposed  to  flower  oftener 
than  once  in  seven  years,  and  I  was  five  days 
finding  it.  That  was  why  I  never  knew  what 
went  on  at  Mrs.  Saybrick's.  Nobody  else  did, 
apparently,  for  I  never  heard  a  breath  of 
gossip,  and  that  must  have  been  Doctor  Chal- 
loner's  concern,  for  I  am  sure  Netta  would 
never  have  known  how  to  avoid  it. 

Netta  was  pretty,  and  Saybrick  had  been 
gone  five  months.  Challoner  had  a  thin, 
romantic  face,  and  eyes — even  I  had  to  admit 
the  compelling  attraction  of  his  eyes;  and  his 
hands  were  fine  and  white.  Saybrick's  hands 
were  cracked,  broken-nailed,  a  driller's  hands, 
and  one  of  them  was  twisted  from  the  time  he 
was  leaded,  working  on  the  Lucky  Jim.  If  it 
came  to  that,  though,  Netta's  husband  might 
have  been  anything  he  pleased,  and  Challoner 
would  still  have  had  his  way  with  her.  He  always 
did  with  women,  as  if  to  make  up  for  not  having 
it  with  the  world.  And  the  life  at  Maverick  was 
deadly,  appallingly  dull.  The  stark  houses, 
the  rubbishy  streets,  the  women  who  went  about 
in  them  in  calico  wrappers,  the  draggling  speech 
of  the  men,  the  wide,  shadowless  table-lands, 
9  115 


LOST    BORDERS 

the  hard,  bright  skies,  and  the  days  all  of  one 
pattern,  that  went  so  stilly  by  that  you  only 
knew  it  was  afternoon  when  you  smelled  the 
fried  cabbage  Mrs.  Mulligan  was  cooking  for 
supper. 

At  this  distance  I  cannot  say  that  I  blamed 
Netta,  am  not  sure  of  not  being  glad  that  she 
had  her  hour  of  the  rose- red  glow — if  she  had  it. 
You  are  to  bear  in  mind  that  all  this  time  I 
was  camping  out  in  the  creosote  belt  on  the 
slope  of  Waban,  and  as  to  what  had  really 
happened  neither  Netta  nor  Challoner  ever 
said  a  word.  I  keep  saying  things  like  this 
about  Netta's  being  pretty  and  all,  just  as  if  I 
thought  they  had  anything  to  do  with  it ;  truth 
is,  the  man  had  just  a  gift  of  taking  souls,  and 
I,  even  I,  judicious  and  disapproving — but  you 
shall  hear. 

At  that  time  the  stage  from  Maverick  was  a 
local  affair  going  down  to  Posada,  where  pas 
sengers  from  the  P.  and  S.  booked  for  the 
Mojave  line,  returning  after  a  wait  of  hours  on 
the  same  day. 

It  happened  that  the  morning  I  came  back 

from  Waban,  Doctor  Challoner  left  Maverick. 

Being  saddle  weary,  I  had  planned  to  send  on  the 

horses  by  Indian  George,  and  take  the  stage 

116 


THE   FAKIR 

where  it  crossed  my  trail  an  hour  out  from 
Posada,  going  home  on  it  in  the  afternoon.  I 
remember  poking  the  botany -case  under  the 
front  seat  and  turning  round  to  be  hit  straight 
between  the  eyes,  as  it  were,  by  Netta  Say  brick 
and  Doctor  Challoner.  The  doctor  was  wearing 
his  usual  air  of  romantic  mystery ;  wearing  it  a 
little  awry — or  perhaps  it  was  only  knowing 
the  man  that  made  me  read  the  perturbation 
under  it.  But  it  was  plain  to  see  what  Netta 
was  about.  Her  hat  was  tilted  by  the  jolting 
of  the  stage,  white  alkali  dust  lay  heavy  on  the 
folds  of  her  dress,  and  she  never  would  wear 
hair-pins  enough;  but  there  was  that  in  every 
turn  and  posture,  in  every  note  of  her  flat, 
childish  voice,  that  acknowledged  the  man 
beside  her.  Her  excitement  was  almost  febrile. 
It  was  part  of  Netta 's  unsophistication  that  she 
seemed  not  to  know  that  she  gave  herself  away, 
and  the  witness  of  it  was  that  she  had  brought 
the  baby. 

You  would  not  have  believed  that  any 
woman  would  plan  to  run  away  with  a  man  like 
Frank  Challoner  and  take  that  great,  heavy- 
headed,  drooling  child.  But  that  is  what  Netta 
had  done.  I  am  not  sure  it  was  maternal 
instinct,  either;  she  probably  did  not  know 
117 


LOST    BORDERS 

what  else  to  do  with  him.  He  had  pale,  pro 
truding  eyes  and  reddish  hair,  and  every  time 
he  clawed  at  the  doctor's  sleeve  I  could  see  the 
man  withhold  a  shudder. 

I  suppose  it  was  my  being  in  a  manner  con 
founded  by  this  extraordinary  situation  that 
made  it  possible  for  Doctor  Challoner  to  renew 
his  acquaintance  with  more  warmth  than  the 
facts  allowed.  He  fairly  pitched  himself  into  an 
intimacy  of  reminiscence,  and  it  was  partly  to 
pay  him  for  this,  I  suppose,  and  partly  to  gratify 
a  natural  curiosity,  that  made  me  so  abrupt  with 
him  afterward.  I  remember  looking  around, 
when  we  got  down,  at  the  little  station  where  I 
must  wait  two  hours  for  the  return  stage,  at 
the  seven  unpainted  pine  cabins,  at  the  eating- 
house,  and  the  store,  and  the  two  saloons,  in  the 
instant  hope  of  refuge,  and  then  out  across  the 
alkali  flat  fringed  with  sparse,  unwholesome 
pickle-weed,  and  deciding  that  that  would  not 
do,  and  then  turning  round  to  take  the  situa 
tion  by  the  throat,  as  it  were.  There  was  Netta, 
with  that  great  child  dragging  on  her  arm  and 
her  hat  still  on  one  side,  with  a  silly  conscious 
ness  of  Doctor  Challoner's  movements,  and  he 
still  trying  for  the  jovial  note  of  old  acquaint 
ances  met  by  chance.  In  a  moment  more  I  had 
118 


THE   FAKIR 

him  around  the  corner  of  the  station-house  and 
out  with  my  question. 

"Doctor  Challoner,  are  you  running  away 
with  Netta  Saybrick?" 

"Well,  no,"  trying  to  carry  it  jauntily;  "I 
think  she  is  running  away  with  me."  Then, 
all  his  pretension  suddenly  sagging  on  him  like 
an  empty  cayaque:  "On my  soul,  I  don't  know 
what's  got  into  the  woman.  I  was  as  surprised 
as  you  were  when  she  got  on  the  stage  with  me ' ' 
— on  my  continuing  to  look  steadily  at  him — 
"she  was  a  pretty  little  thing  .  .  .  and  the  life 
is  devilish  dull  there.  ...  I  suppose  I  flirted  a 
little" — blowing  himself  out,  as  it  were,  with 
an  assumption  of  honesty — "on  my  word, 
there  was  nothing  more  than  that." 

Flirted!  He  called  it  that;  but  women  do 
not  take  their  babies  and  run  away  from  home 
for  the  sake  of  a  little  flirting.  The  life  was 
devilish  dull — did  he  need  to  tell  me  that! 
And  she  was  pretty — well,  whatever  had  hap 
pened  he  was  bound  to  tell  me  that  it  was 
nothing,  and  I  was  bound  to  behave  as  if  I 
believed  him. 

"She  will  go  back,"  he  began  to  say,  looking 
bleak  and  drawn  in  the  searching  light.     "She 
must  go  back!     She  must!" 
119 


LOST    BORDERS 

"Well,  maybe  you  can  persuade  her,"  said  I ; 
but  I  relented  after  that  enough  to  take  care  of 
the  baby  while  he  and  Netta  went  for  a  walk. 

The  whole  mesa  and  the  flat  crawled  with 
heat,  and  the  steel  rails  ran  on  either  side  of 
them  like  thin  fires,  as  if  the  slagged  track  were 
the  appointed  way  that  Netta  had  chosen  to 
walk.  They  went  out  as  far  as  the  section- 
house  and  back  toward  the  deserted  station  till 
I  could  almost  read  their  faces  clear,  and 
turned  again,  back  and  forth  through  the  heat- 
fogged  atmosphere  like  the  figures  in  a  dream. 
I  could  see  this  much  from  their  postures,  that 
Challoner  was  trying  to  hold  to  some  consistent 
attitude  which  he  had  adopted,  and  Netta 
wasn't  understanding  it.  I  could  see  her  throw 
out  her  hands  in  a  gesture  of  abandonment, 
and  then  I  saw  her  stand  as  if  the  Pit  yawned 
under  her  feet.  The  baby  slept  on  a  station 
bench,  and  I  kept  the  flies  from  him  with  a 
branch  of  pickle-weed.  I  was  out  of  it,  smitten 
anew  with  the  utter  inutility  of  all  the  standards 
which  were  not  bred  of  experience,  but  merely 
came  down  to  me  with  the  family  teaspoons. 
Seen  by  the  fierce  desert  light  they  looked  like 
the  spoons,  thin  and  worn  at  the  edges.  I 
should  have  been  ashamed  to  offer  them  to 

120 


THE    FAKIR 

Netta  Saybrick.  It  was  this  sense  of  detached 
helplessness  toward  the  life  at  Maverick  that 
Netta  afterward  explained  she  and  the  other 
women  sensed  but  misread  in  me.  They 
couldn't  account  for  it  on  any  grounds  except 
that  I  felt  myself  above  them.  And  all  the 
time  I  was  sick  with  the  strained,  meticulous 
inadequacy  of  my  own  soul.  I  understood 
well  enough,  then,  that  the  sense  of  personal 
virtue  comes  to  most  women  through  an  in 
tervening  medium  of  sedulous  social  guardian 
ship.  It  is  only  when  they  love  that  it  reaches 
directly  to  the  centre  of  consciousness,  as  if  it 
were  ultimately  nothing  more  than  the  in 
stinctive  movement  of  right  love  to  preserve 
itself  by  a  voluntary  seclusion.  It  was  not  her 
faithlessness  to  Saybrick  that  tormented  Netta 
out  there  between  the  burning  rails ;  it  was  going 
back  to  him  that  was  the  intolerable  offence. 
Passion  had  come  upon  her  like  a  flame-burst, 
heaven-sent;  she  justified  it  on  the  grounds  of 
its  completeness,  and  lacked  the  sophistication 
for  any  other  interpretation. 

Challoner  was  a  bad  man,  but  he  was  not  bad 
enough  to  reveal  to  Netta  Saybrick  the  vulgar 
cheapness  of  his  own  relation  to  the  incident. 
Besides,  he  hadn't  time.  In  two  hours  the 

121 


LOST   BORDERS 

return  stage  for  Maverick  left  the  station,  and 
he  could  never  in  that  time  get  Netta  Saybrick 
to  realize  the  gulf  between  his  situation  and 
hers. 

He  came  back  to  the  station  after  a  while  on 
some  pretext,  and  said,  with  his  back  to  Netta, 
moving  his  lips  with  hardly  any  sound:  "She 
must  go  back  on  the  stage.  She  must ! "  Then 
with  a  sudden  setting  of  his  jaws,  "You've  got 
to  help  me."  He  sat  down  beside  me,  and  began 
to  devote  himself  to  the  baby  and  the  flies. 

Netta  stood  out  for  a  while  expecting  him, 
and  then  came  and  sat  provisionally  on  the  edge 
of  the  station  platform,  ready  at  the  slightest 
hint  of  an  opportunity  to  carry  him  away  into 
the  glimmering  heat  out  toward  the  station- 
house,  and  resume  the  supremacy  of  her  poor 
charms. 

She  was  resenting  my  presence  as  an  inter 
ference,  and  I  believe  always  cherished  a 
thought  that  but  for  the  accident  of  my  being 
there  the  incident  might  have  turned  out 
differently.  I  could  see  that  Challoner's  at 
titude,  whatever  it  was,  was  beginning  to  make 
itself  felt.  She  was  looking  years  older,  and 
yet  somehow  pitifully  puzzled  and  young,  as 
if  the  self  of  her  had  had  a  wound  which  her 

122 


THE    FAKIR 

intelligence  had  failed  to  grasp.  I  could  see, 
too,  that  Challoner  had  made  up  his  mind  to  be 
quit  of  her,  quietly  if  he  could,  but  at  any  risk 
of  a  scene,  still  to  be  quit.  And  it  was  forty 
minutes  till  stage-time. 

Challoner  sat  on  the  bare  station  bench  with 
his  arm  out  above  the  baby  protectingly — it 
was  a  manner  always  effective — and  began  to 
talk  about ' '  goodness, ' '  of  all  things  in  the  world. 
Don't  ask  me  what  he  said.  It  was  the  sort  of 
talk  many  women  would  have  called  beautiful, 
and  though  it  was  mostly  addressed  to  me, 
it  was  every  word  of  it  directed  to  Netta  Say- 
brick's  soul.  Much  of  it  went  high  and  wide, 
but  I  could  catch  the  pale  reflection  of  it  in  her 
face  like  a  miner  guessing  the  sort  of  day  it  is 
from  the  glimmer  of  it  on  a  puddle  at  the  bottom 
of  a  shaft.  In  it  Netta  saw  a  pair  of  heroic 
figures  renouncing  a  treasure  they  had  found 
for  the  sake  of  the  bitter  goodness  by  which 
the  world  is  saved.  They  had  had  the  courage 
to  take  it  while  they  could,  but  were  much 
too  exemplary  to  enjoy  it  at  the  cost  of  pain 
to  any  other  heart.  He  started  with  the  as 
sumption  that  she  meant  to  go  back  to  Maverick, 
and  recurred  to  it  with  a  skilful  and  hypnotic 
insistence,  painting  upon  her  mind  by  large  and 
123 


LOST   BORDERS 

general  inference  the  picture  of  himself,  helped 
greatly  in  his  career  by  her  noble  renunciation 
of  him.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Saybrick,  if  his 
wife  really  had  gone  away  with  Doctor  Chal- 
loner,  would  have  followed  him  up  and  shot  him, 
I  suppose, 'and  no  end  of  vulgar  and  disagree 
able  things  might  have  come  from  the  affair; 
but  Challoner  managed  to  keep  it  on  so  high 
a  plane  that  even  I  never  thought  of  them  until 
long  afterward.  And  right  here  is  where  the 
uncertainty  as  to  the  part  I  really  played  begins. 
I  can  never  make  up  my  mind  whether  Chal 
loner,  from  long  practice  in  such  affairs,  had 
hit  upon  just  the  right  note  of  extrication,  or 
whether,  cornered,  he  fell  back  desperately  on 
the  eternal  Tightness .  And  what  was  he,  to 
know  lightness  at  his  need  ? 

He  was  terribly  in  earnest,  holding  Netta's 
eyes  with  his  own;  his  forehead  sweated, 
hollows  showed  about  his  eyes,  and  the  dreadful 
slackness  of  the  corner  of  the  mouth  that 
comes  of  the  whole  mind  being  drawn  away 
upon  the  object  of  attack  to  the  neglect  of  its 
defences.  He  was  so  bent  on  getting  Netta 
fixed  in  the  idea  that  she  must  go  back  to 
Maverick  that  if  she  had  not  been  a  good  deal 
of  a  fool  she  must  have  seen  that  he  had  given 
124 


THE   FAKIR 

away  the  whole  situation  into  my  hands.  I 
believed — I  hope — I  did  the  right  thing,  but 
I  am  not  sure  I  could  have  helped  taking  the 
cue  which  was  pressed  upon  me ;  he  was  as  bad 
as  they  made  them,  but  there  I  was  lending 
my  whole  soul  to  the  accomplishment  of  his 
purpose,  which  was,  briefly,  to  get  comfortably 
off  from  an  occasion  in  which  he  had  behaved 
very  badly. 

All  this  time  Challoner  kept  a  conscious  at 
tention  on  the  stage  stables  far  at  the  other 
end  of  the  shadeless  street.  The  moment  he 
saw  the  driver  come  out  of  it  with  the  horses, 
the  man's  soul  fairly  creaked  with  the  release 
of  tension.  It  released,  too,  an  accession  of 
that  power  of  personal  fascination  for  which 
he  was  remarkable. 

Netta  sat  with  her  back  to  the  street,  and  the 
beautiful  solicitude  with  which  he  took  up  the 
baby  at  that  moment,  smoothed  its  dress  and 
tied  on  its  little  cap,  had  no  significance  for  her. 
It  was  not  until  she  heard  the  rattle  of  the 
stage  turning  into  the  road  that  she  stood  up 
suddenly,  alarmed.  Challoner  put  the  baby 
into  my  arms. 

Did  I  tell  you  that  all  this  time  between  me 
and  this  man  there  ran  the  inexplicable  sense 
125 


LOST    BORDERS 

of  being  bonded  together;  the  same  suggestion 
of  a  superior  and  exclusive  intimacy  which 
ensnared  poor  Netta  Saybrick  no  doubt,  the 
absolute  call  of  self  and  sex  by  which  a  man, 
past  all  reasonableness  and  belief,  ranges  a 
woman  on  his  side.  He  was  a  Fakir,  a  common 
quack,  a  scoundrel  if  you  will,  but  there  was 
the  call.  I  had  answered  it.  I  was  under  the 
impression,  though  not  remembering  what  he 
said,  when  he  had  handed  me  that  great  lump 
of  a  child,  that  I  had  received  a  command  to 
hold  on  to  it,  to  get  into  the  stage  with  it, 
and  not  to  give  it  up  on  any  consideration; 
and  without  saying  anything,  I  had  promised. 

I  do  not  know  if  it  was  the  look  that  must  have 
passed  between  us  at  that,  or  the  squeal  of  the 
running-gear  that  shattered  her  dream,  but  I 
perceived  on  the  instant  that  Netta  had  had  a 
glimpse  of  where  she  stood.  She  saw  herself  for 
the  moment  a  fallen  woman,  forsaken,  despised. 
There  was  the  Pit  before  her  which  Challoner's 
desertion  and  my  knowledge  of  it  had  digged. 
She  clutched  once  at  her  bosom  and  at  her 
skirts  as  if  already  she  heard  the  hiss  of  crawling 
shame.  Then  it  was  that  Challoner  turned 
toward  her  with  the  Look. 

It  rose  in  his  face  and  streamed  to  her  from 
126 


THE   FAKIR 

his  eyes  as  though  it  were  the  one  thing  in  the 
world  of  a  completeness  equal  to  the  anguish 
in  her  breast,  as  though,  before  it  rested  there, 
it  had  been  through  all  the  troubled  intricacies 
of  sin,  and  come  upon  the  root  of  a  superior 
fineness  that  every  soul  feels  piteously  to  lie 
at  the  back  of  all  its  own  affronting  vagaries, 
brooding  over  it  in  a  large,  gentle  way.  It  was 
the  forgiveness— nay,  the  obliteration  of  offence 
— and  the  most  Challoner  could  have  known 
of  forgivenesss  was  his  own  great  need  of  it. 
Out  of  that  Look  I  could  see  the  woman's  soul 
rising  rehabilitated,  astonished,  and  on  the 
instant,  out  there  beyond  the  man  and  the 
woman,  between  the  thin  fiery  lines  of  the 
rails,  leading  back  to  the  horizon,  the  tall, 
robed  Figure  writing  in  the  sand. 

Oh,  it  was  a  hallucination,  if  you  like,  of  the 
hour,  the  place,  the  perturbed  mind,  the  daz 
zling  glimmer  of  the  alkali  flat,  of  the  incident 
of  a  sinful  woman  and  a  common  fakir,  faking  an 
absolution  that  he  might  the  more  easily  avoid 
an  inconvenience,  and  I  the  tool  made  to  see 
incredibly  by  some  trick  of  suggestion  how 
impossible  it  should  be  that  any  but  the  chief 
of  sinners  should  understand  forgiveness.  But 
the  Look  continued  to  hold  the  moment  in  solu- 
127 


LOST   BORDERS 

tion,  while  the  woman  climbed  out  of  the  Pit. 
I  saw  her  put  out  her  hand  with  the  instinctive 
gesture  of  the  sinking,  and  Challoner  take  it 
with  the  formality  of  farewell;  and  as  the  dust 
of  the  arriving  stage  billowed  up  between  them, 
the  Figure  turned,  fading,  dissolving  .  .  .  but 
with  the  Look,  consoling,  obliterating.  .  .  . 
He  too  .  .  .  ! 

"It  was  very  good  of  you,  Mrs.  Saybrick, 
to  give  me  so  much  of  a  good-bye  ..."  Chal 
loner  was  saying  as  he  put  Netta  into  the  stage ; 
and  then  to  me,  "You  must  take  good  care  of 
her  .  .  .  good-bye." 

"Good-bye,  Frank" — I  had  never  called 
Doctor  Challoner  by  his  name  before.  I  did 
not  like  him  well  enough  to  call  him  by  it 
at  any  time,  but  there  was  the  Look;  it  had 
reached  out  and  enwrapped  me  in  a  kind  of 
rarefied  intimacy  of  extenuation  and  under 
standing.  He  stood  on  the  station  platform 
staring  steadily  after  us,  and  as  long  as  we  had 
sight  of  him  in  the  thick,  bitter  dust,  the  Look 
held. 

If  this  were  a  story  merely,  or  a  story  of 
Franklin  Challoner,   it  would  end   there.     He 
never  thought  of  us  again,  you  may  depend, 
128 


THE   FAKIR 

except  to  thank  his  stars  for  getting  so  lightly 
off,  and  to  go  on  in  the  security  of  his  success 
to  other  episodes  from  which  he  returned  as 
scatheless. 

But  I  found  out  in  a  very  few  days  that 
whether  it  was  to  take  rank  as  an  incident  or 
an  event  in  Netta  Saybrick's  life  depended  on 
whether  or  not  I  said  anything  about  it.  No 
body  had  taken  any  notice  of  her  day's  ride  to 
Posada.  Say  brick  came  home  in  about  ten 
days,  and  Netta  seemed  uncommonly  glad  to 
see  him,  as  if  in  the  preoccupation  of  his 
presence  she  found  a  solace  for  her  fears. 

But  from  the  day  of  our  return  she  had 
evinced  an  extraordinary  liking  for  my  com 
pany.  She  would  be  running  in  and  out  of  the 
house  at  all  hours,  offering  to  help  me  with  my 
sewing  or  to  stir  up  a  cake,  kindly  offices  that 
had  to  be  paid  in  kind ;  and  if  I  slipped  into  the 
neighbors'  on  an  errand,  there  a  moment  after 
would  come  Netta.  Very  soon  it  became  clear 
to  me  that  she  was  afraid  of  what  I  might  tell. 
So  long  as  she  had  me  under  her  immediate  eye 
she  could  be  sure  I  was  not  taking  away  her 
character,  but  when  I  was  not,  she  must  have 
suffered  horribly.  I  might  have  told,  too,  by 
the  woman's  code;  she  was  really  not  respect- 
129 


LOST   BORDERS 

able,  and  we  made  a  great  deal  of  that  in 
Maverick.  I  might  refuse  to  have  anything 
to  do  with  her  and  justified  myself  explaining 
why. 

But  Netta  was  not  sure  how  much  I  knew, 
and  could  not  risk  betrayal  by  a  plea.  She 
had,  too,  the  natural  reticence  of  the  villager, 
and  though  she  must  have  been  aching  for  news 
of  Doctor  Challoner,  touch  of  him,  the  very 
sound  of  his  name,  she  rarely  ever  mentioned 
it,  but  grew  strained  and  thinner;  watching, 
watching. 

If  that  incident  was  known,  Netta  would 
have  been  ostracized  and  Saybrick  might  have 
divorced  her.  And  I  was  going  dumb  with 
amazement  to  discover  that  nothing  had  come 
of  it,  nothing  could  come  of  it  so  long  as  I  kept 
still.  It  was  a  deadly  sin,  as  I  had  been  taught, 
as  I  believed — of  damnable  potentiality;  and 
as  long  as  nobody  told  it  was  as  if  it  had  never 
been,  as  if  that  look  of  Challoner's  had  really 
the  power  as  it  had  the  seeming  of  absolving 
her  from  all  soil  and  stain. 

I  cannot  now  remember  if  I  was  ever  tempted 

to  tell  on  Netta  Saybrick,  but  I  know  with  the 

obsession  of  that  look  upon  my  soul  I  never  did. 

And  in  the  mean  time,  from  being  so  much  in 

130 


THE   FAKIR 

each  other's  company,  Netta  and  I  became 
very  good  friends.  That  was  why,  a  little  more 
than  a  year  afterward,  she  chose  to  have  me 
with  her  when  her  second  child  was  born.  In 
Maverick  we  did  things  for  one  another  that  in 
more  sophisticated  communities  go  to  the 
service  of  paid  attendants.  That  was  the  time 
when  the  suspicion  that  had  lain  at  the  bottom 
of  Netta's  shallow  eyes  whenever  she  looked 
at  me  went  out  of  them  forever. 

It  was  along  about  midnight  and  the  worst 
yet  to  come.  I  sat  holding  Netta's  hands,  and 
beyond  in  the  room  where  the  lamp  was,  the 
doctor  lifted  Saybrick  through  his  stressful 
hour  with  cribbage  and  toddy.  I  could  see  the 
gleam  of  the  light  on  Saybrick's  red,  hairy 
hands,  a  driller's  hands,  and  whenever  a  sound 
came  from  the  inner  room,  the  uneasy  lift  of 
his  shoulders  and  the  twitching  of  his  lip ;  then 
the  doctor  pushed  the  whiskey  over  toward 
him  and  jovially  dealt  the  cards  anew. 

Netta,  tossing  on  her  pillow,  came  into  range 
with  Saybrick's  blunt  profile  outlined  against 
the  cheaply  papered  wall,  and  I  suppose  her 
husband's  distress  was  good  to  her  to  see.  She 
looked  at  him  a  long  time  quietly. 

" Henry's  a  good  man,"  she  said  at  last. 


LOST   BORDERS 

"Yes,"  I  said;  and  then  she  turned  to  me 
narrowly  with  the  expiring  spark  of  anxious 
cunning  in  her  eyes. 

"And  I've  been  a  good  wife  to  him,"  said 
she.  It  was  half  a  challenge.  And  I,  trapped 
by  the  hour,  became  a  fakir  in  my  turn,  called 
instantly  on  all  my  soul  and  answered — with 
the  Look — "Everybody  knows  that,  Netta"- 
held  on  steadily  until  the  spark  went  out.  How 
ever  I  had  done  it  I  could  not  tell,  but  I  saw 
the  trouble  go  out  of  the  woman's  soul  as  the 
lids  drooped,  and  with  it  out  of  my  own  heart 
the  last  of  the  virtuous  resentment  of  the  un- 
tempted.  I  had  really  forgiven  her;  how  then 
was  it  possible  for  the  sin  to  rise  up  and  trouble 
her  more?  Mind  you,  I  grew  up  in  a  church 
that  makes  a  great  deal  of  the  forgiveness  of 
sins  and  signifies  it  by  a  tremendous  particu 
larity  about  behavior,  and  the  most  I  had 
learned  of  the  efficient  exercise  of  forgiveness 
iwas  from  the  worst  man  I  had  ever  known. 

About  an  hour  before  dawn,  when  a  wind 
began  to  stir,  and  out  on  the  mesa  the  coyotes 
howled  returning  from  the  hunt,  stooping  to 
tuck  the  baby  in  her  arms,  I  felt  Netta's  lips 
brush  against  my  hand. 

"You've  been  mighty  good  to  me,"  she  said. 
132 


THE   FAKIR 

Well — if  I  were  pushed  for  it,  I  should  think 
it  worth  mentioning — but  I  am  not  so  sure. 


When  Tennessee,  after  about  sixty  years  of 
prospecting,  grub  -  staking,  and  days'  wages, 
had  made  a  little  strike,  he  declared  himself 
done  with  desertness,  and  of  a  mind  to  go  down 
to  the  city  to  some  recently  developed  con 
nections  and  heirs,  to  be  properly  taken  care 
of  for  the  rest  of  his  years.  That  was  along  in 
the  beginning  of  winter,  when  interest  narrowed 
to  watching  the  snow-line  approach  and  recede 
along  the  flank  of  the  Sierras,  and  the  under 
taking  was  accounted  to  him  for  wisdom. 
And  about  two  months  later,  when  I  was  out 
looking  mesaward  for  the  pale  tinge  of  the 
freshening  sage  that,  however  fast  you  may 
seek  toward  it,  is  no  more  to  be  come  up  with 
than  the  mirage,  ^suddenly  across  my  prospect 
bulked  the  large,  lumbering  figure  of  Tennessee. 
What  he  said  was  that  in  the  city  he  could 
never  step  out  of  the  door  but  there  was  a  house 
right  bung  up  against  his  eyes. 

"A  man,"  said  Tennessee,  "don't  have  no 
chance  to  stretch  his  vision." 

But  when  the   Rev.   William  Calvin  Gains 


LOST   BORDERS 

came  down  fresh  from  his  seminary  somewhere 
about  Oakland  to  awaken,  in  the  best  imitation 
of  a  popular  city  preacher  he  could  manage,  our 
interest  in  spiritual  things,  he  made  just  the 
opposite  mistake  of  not  understanding  that 
here  the  vision  stretches  beyond  the  boundary 
of  sense  and  things.  Though  the  desert  has  had 
a  reputation  in  times  past  for  the  making  of 
religious  leaders,  it  is  no  field  for  converts. 
Judge  how  a  conventional,  pew-fed  religion 
would  flourish  in  the  presence  of  what  I  am 
about  to  relate  to  you. 


X 

THE    POCKET-HUNTER'S    STORY 

THE  crux  of  this  story  for  the  Pocket- 
Hunter  was  that  he  had  known  the  two 
men,  Mac  and  Creelman,  before  they  came  into 
it;  known  them,  in  fact,  in  the  beginning  of 
that  mutual  distrust  which  grew  out  of  an 
earlier  friendliness  into  one  of  those  expansive 
enmities  which  in  the  spined  and  warted  hu 
manity  of  the  camps  have  as  ready  an  accept 
ance  as  the  devoted  partnerships  of  which  Wells 
Bassit  furnished  the  pre-eminent  example.  It 
was,  he  believed,  in  some  such  relationship 
their  acquaintance  had  begun,  and  from  which 
they  now  drew  the  sustenance  of  those  separate 
devils  of  hate  that,  nesting  in  corrosive  hollows 
of  their  hosts,  rose  to  froth  and  rage,  each  at 
the  mere  intimation  of  a  merit  in  the  other. 

No  one  knew  what  the  turn  of  the  screw  had 
been  that  set  them  gnashing,  but  it  was  sup- 


LOST   BORDERS 

posed,  on  no  better  evidence,  perhaps,  than  that 
such  trouble  is  at  the  bottom  of  most  quarrels 
in  the  camps,  to  have  been  about  a  mine.  The 
final  crisis,  the  very  memory  of  which  seemed 
to  hold  for  him  a  moment  of  recurrent,  hair- 
lifting  horror,  was  known  by  the  Pocket- 
Hunter,  and  by  some  of  the  others,  to  have 
been  brought  on  by  an  Indian  woman  down 
Parrimint-way. 

She  was  Mac's  woman;  though,  except  as 
being  his,  he  was  not  thought  to  set  particular 
store  by  her.  He  used  to  leave  her  in  his 
cabin  while  he  was  off  in  the  Hills  for  a  three 
weeks'  pasear;  but  the  tacit  admission  of  an 
Indian  woman  as  no  fit  subject  for  white  men 
to  fight  over  forbade  his  being  put  to  the  ordi 
nary  provocation  on  account  of  her.  There 
fore,  when  Creelman  projected  his  offence, 
which  was  to  excite  in  his  enemy  the  desire  for 
killing  without  providing  him  with  a  sufficient 
excuse,  there  was  a  vague  notion  moving  in  the 
heavy  fibre  of  his  mind  that  there  was  a  species 
of  humor  in  what  he  was  about  to  do.  But 
he  would  probably  not  have  gone  on  to  Tres 
Pinos  and  told  of  it,  if  he  had  known  how  soon 
it  was  to  come  to  Mac's  ears. 

This,  you  understand,  was  long  after  their 
136 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

grudge  had  climbed  by  inconsiderable  occa 
sions  to  the  point  where  Mac  had  several  times 
offered  to  kill  Creelman  on  no  motion  but  the 
pleasure  of  being  rid  of  his  company. 

Mac  was  a  sickly  man,  and  by  that,  and  his 
having  had  the  worst  of  it  in  their  earlier  en 
counters,  his  rage  so  much  the  more  possessed 
him  that,  when  he  had  come  back  to  his  cabin 
and  the  Indian  woman  had  told  him  her  story, 
he  was  able  by  that  mere  spur  of  a  possession 
trifled  with  to  take  the  short  leap  from  intent 
to  performance  at  a  bound.  There  was  no  such 
bodily  leap  possible,  of  course ;  he  had  to  trudge 
the  whole  of  one  day  on  foot  to  Tres  Pinos,  an 
old  weakness  battling  with  his  rage.  He  was 
one  of  those  illy-furnished  souls  whom  the 
wilderness  despoils  most  completely  —  hair, 
beard,  and  skin  of  him  burned  to  one  sandy 
sallowness,  the  eyelashes  of  no  color,  the  voice 
of  no  timbre,  more  or  less  stiffened  at  the 
joints  by  the  poison  of  leaded  ores,  his  very 
name  shorn  of  its  distinguishing  syllable;  no 
more  of  him  left,  in  fact,  than  would  serve  as 
a  vehicle  for  hating  Creelman.  When  he  came 
to  Tres  Pinos  and  learned  that  the  other  had 
gone  on  from  there,  nobody  would  tell  him 
where,  the  rage  of  bafflement  threw  him  into 


LOST    BORDERS 

some  kind  of  a  fit,  and  blood  gushed  from  his 
nose  and  mouth. 

All  this  the  Pocket-Hunter  was  possessed  of 
when  he  set  out  shortly  after  with  his  pack  and 
burros,  prospecting  toward  the  Dry  Creek  dis 
trict,  where  in  due  time  he  crossed  the  trail  of 
Shorty  Wells  and  Long  Tom  Bassit.  There 
was  no  particular  reason  why  Wells  should 
have  been  called  Shorty,  except  that  Long 
Tom  was  of  a  stature  to  give  to  any  average 
man  in  his  vicinity  a  title  to  that  adjective. 
Further  than  that  he  gave  no  other  warrant  to 
the  virtues,  aptitudes,  propensities  with  which 
Shorty  credited  him,  than  the  negative  one  of 
not  denying  them,  in  camps  where  they  were 
known  the  opinion  gained  ground  that  there 
was  very  little  to  Long  Tom  but  his  size  and 
his  amiability,  which  was  remarked  upon,  but 
that  Shorty,  having  discovered  this  creditable 
baggage  in  his  own  pack,  had  laid  it  to  Bassit, 
not  being  able  to  say  else  how  he  came  by  it; 
but  there  they  were,  as  inveterate  a  pair  of 
partners  as  the  camps  ever  bred,  owning  to 
no  greater  satisfaction  than  just  to  be  abroad 
in  the  hills  together  following  the  Golden 
Hope;  and  there  on  a  day  between  Dry  Creek 
and  Denman's  the  Pocket-Hunter  found  them. 

'38 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

The  way  he  came  to  tell  me  about  it  was  this. 
I  had  laid  by  for  a  nooning  under  the  quaking- 
asp  by  Peterscreek  on  the  trail  from  Tunawai, 
and  found  him  before  me  with  his  head  under 
one  of  those  woven  shelters  of  living  boughs 
which  the  sheep-herders  leave  in  that  country, 
and  he  moved  out  to  make  room  for  me  in  its 
hand's-breadth  of  shade. 

Understand,  there  was  no  more  shade  to  be 
got  there.  Straight  before  us  went  the  meagre 
sands;  to  every  yard  or  so  of  space  its  foot- 
high,  sapless  shrub.  Somewhere  at  the  back 
of  us  lifted,  out  of  a  bank  of  pinkish- violet  mist, 
sierras  white  and  airy.  Eastward  where  the 
earth  sagged  on  its  axis,  in  some  dreary,  beg 
gared  sleep,  pale,  wispish  clouds  went  up.  Now 
and  then  to  no  wind  the  quaking-asps  clattered 
their  dry  bones  of  leaves. 

We  had  been  talking,  the  Pocket-Hunter  and 
I,  of  that  curious  obsession  of  travel  by  which 
the  mind,  pressing  on  in  the  long,  open  trail 
ahead  of  the  dragging  desert  pace,  seems  often 
to  develop  a  capacity  for  going  on  alone  in  it, 
so  that  it  becomes  involved  in  one  sliding  pict 
ure,  as  it  were,  of  what  is  ahead  and  what  at 
hand,  until,  when  the  body  stops  for  necessary 
rest  and  food,  it  is  impossible  to  say  if  it  is 


LOST   BORDERS 

here  where  it  halted,  or  there  where  the  mind 
possessed.  I  had  said  that  this  accounted  to 
me  not  only  for  the  extraordinary  feats  of  en 
durance  in  desert  travel,  but  for  the  great  diffi 
culty  prospectors  have  in  relocating  places  they 
have  marked,  so  mazed  they  are  by  that  mixed 
aspect  of  strangeness  and  familiarity  that  every 
district  wears,  which,  long  before  it  has  been 
entered  by  the  body,  has  been  appraised  by  the 
eye  of  the  mind. 

"But  suppose,"  said  the  Pocket-Hunter,  "it 
really  does  go  on  by  itself?" 

"And  where,"  I  wished  to  know,  "would  be 
the  witness  to  that,  unless  it  brought  back  a 
credible  report  of  what  it  had  seen?" 

"Or  done,"  suggested  the  Pocket-Hunter, 
"what  it  set  out  to  do.  That  would  clinch  it, 
I  fancy." 

"But  the  mind  can  only  take  notice,"  I  pro 
tested.  * '  It  can't  do  anything  without  its  body. ' ' 

"Or  another  one,"  suggested  the  Pocket- 
Hunter. 

"Ah,"  said  I,  "tell  me  the  story." 


It  was,  went  on  the  Pocket- Hunter,  after 
he  had  told  me  all  that  I  have  set  down  about 
140 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

the  four  men  who  made  the  story,  about  nine 
of  the  morning  (when (he  came  to  Dry  Creek  on 
the  way  to  Jawbone  Canon,  and  the  day  was 
beginning  to  curl  up  and  smoke  along  the 
edges  with  the  heat,  rocking  with  the  motion 
of  it,  and  water  of  mirage  rolling  like  quick 
silver  in  the  hollows.)  What  the  Pocket-Hunter 
said  exactly  was  that  it  was  a  morning  in  May, 
but  it  conies  to  the  same  thing.  He  had  just 
come  out  of  the  wash  by  Cactus  Flat  when  he 
was  aware  of  a  man  chasing  about  in  the  heat 
fog,  and  making  out  to  want  something  more 
than  common.  Even  as  early  as  that  in  the 
incident  the  Pocket-Hunter  thought  he  had 
encountered  some  faint,  floating  films  from 
that  coil  of  inexplicable  dreadfulness  in  which 
he  was  so  soon  to  find  himself  involved,  and 
yet  he  was  not  sure  that  it  might  not  have 
been  chiefly  in  the  extraordinary  manner  of 
the  man's  approach,  seeing  him  caught  up  in 
the  mirage,  drawn  out  and  dwarfed  again, 
"like  some  kind  of  human  accordion,"  said  the 
Pocket-Hunter,  and  now  rolled  toward  him 
with  limbs  grotesquely  multiplied  in  a  river  of 
mist. 

Presently,  however,  he  got  the  man  between 
him  and  the  sun,  in  such  a  way  that  he  was 
141 


LOST   BORDERS 

able  to  make  out  it  was  himself  who  was 
wanted,  and  when  he  had  slewed  the  burros 
round  to  come  up  to  him,  he  could  see  pkinly 
who  it  was,  and  it  was  Wells.  It  was  altogether 
so  unusual  a  circumstance  to  find  Shorty  Wells 
anywhere  out  of  eyeshot  of  Tom  Bassit  that  it 
was  not  reassuring,  and  Shorty  himself  was  so 
sensible  of  it  that  almost  before  any  greeting 
passed,  he  had  let  out  with  certain  swallowings 
of  the  throat  that  Tom  was  dead. 

It  appeared  the  two  of  them  had  come  over 
Tinpah  two  days  before,  and  Bassit,  who  had 
a  weakness  of  the  heart  that  made  high  places 
a  menace  to  him,  had  accomplished  the  Pass 
apparently  ir  good  order.  But  when  they 
had  taken  the  immense  drop  that  carries  one 
from  the  crest  of  Tinpah  to  Dry  Creek  like  a 
bucket  in  a  shaft,  something  had  gone  sudden 
ly,  irretrievably  wrong.  There  had  been  a  half 
collapse  at  the  foot  of  the  trail,  and  a  complete 
one  a  few  miles  back  on  the  trail  to  Denman's, 
toward  which  they  had  turned  in  extremity. 
Tom  had  suffered  agonizingly,  so  that  if  there 
had  been  any  place  nearer  from  which  help 
might  conceivably  have  come,  Shorty  could  not 
have  left  him  to  go  and  fetch  it;  and  along 
about  the  hour  which  the  Indians  call,  all  in 
142 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

one  word,  the  bluish-light-of-dawn,  Tom  had 
died. 

All  the  way  back  to  camp,  after  he  had  met 
the  Pocket-Hunter,  Shorty  kept  arguing  with 
himself  as  to  whether,  if  he  had  done  the  one 
thing  or  had  not  done  the  other,  it  would  have 
been  better  for  poor  Tom,  and  the  Pocket-Hunter 
assuring  him  for  his  comfort  that  it  would  not, 
keeping  back,  by  some  native  stroke  of  sym 
pathy,  what  he  had  lately  heard  at  Tres  Pinos 
— that  Creelman  had  a  cabin  in  the  Jawbone, 
and  was  living  in  it  what  time  Mac  was  camp 
ing  on  his  trail.  It  was  no  farther  from  the 
foot  of  Tinpah  than  they  had  come  toward 
Denman's,  but  in  the  opposite  direction,  and 
from  their  not  turning  there  it  seemed  likely 
they  had  not  heard  of  it — kinder  if  Shorty 
might  never  come  to  know,  seeing  he  had  not 
known  it  in  time  to  be  of  use  to  Tom.  And 
this  was  a  point  the  Pocket-Hunter  was  pres 
ently  to  make  sure  of,  that  neither  Shorty  nor 
Long  Tom  was  acquainted  with  the  location  of 
the  cabin,  nor  with  Mac  nor  Creelman  by  sight. 

As  it  was,  he  made  the  most  of  comforting 
Shorty  for  having  stayed  by  his  partner  to 
the  last. 

"I  never  left  him  till  he  croaked,"  Shorty 


LOST   BORDERS 

told  him.  "It  was  along  toward  morning  he  went 
quiet,  and  just  as  I  was  goin'  for  to  cover  him 
with  the  blanket,  he  croaked — and  I  come  away. ' ' 

There  was  that  touch  of  dread  in  him  which 
ever  the  figure  of  death  excites  in  simple  minds, 
which,  perhaps  as  much  as  the  wish  to  bring 
help  to  the  burial,  had  turned  him  from  the 
body  of  the  friend  who  was,  and  now  kept 
his  eyes  fixed  persistently  upon  the  ground  as 
they  came  back  to  it  across  the  flat,  which  here, 
made  smooth  in  shining,  leprous  patches  of 
alkali,  presented  no  screen  to  the  disordered 
camp  higher  than  the  sickly  pickle-weed  about 
its  borders.  The  Pocket-Hunter,  therefore,  as 
they  came  on  toward  the  place  where  from  two 
crossed  sticks  of  Shorty's  fire  a  thin  point  of 
flame  wavered  upward,  had  time  for  wondering 
greatly  at  what  he  saw,  which  was  so  little 
what  he  had  been  led  to  expect  there  that  he 
had  not  found  yet  any  warrant  for  mentioning 
it,  when  Shorty,  gathering  himself  toward  what 
he  had  to  face,  lifting  up  his  eyes,  let  out  a 
kind  of  howl  and  ran. 

The  Pocket-Hunter  said  he  did  not  know 
how  soon  Shorty  grasped  the  fact,  which  he 
himself  perceived  with  his  eyes  some  time  be 
fore  his  intelligence  took  hold  of  it,  that  the 
144 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

body  lying  doubled  on  the  sand  some  yards 
from  the  empty  bed  was  not  the  same  that 
Shorty  had  left  stiffening  under  the  blanket. 
He  thought  they  must  have  both  taken  account 
of  it  at  the  same  time,  and  been  stricken  dumb 
by  the  sheer  horror  of  it,  for  he  could  not  re 
member  a  word  spoken  by  either  of  them,  be 
tween  Shorty's  sharp  yell  of  astonishment  and 
the  time  when  they  took  it  by  the  shoulders 
and  turned  it  to  the  sun. 

The  limbs  were  still  lax  enough  with  recent 
life  to  settle  slowly  as  they  stirred  the  body; 
there  were  no  wounds  upon  it,  but  blood  had 
gushed  freely  from  the  nose  and  mouth.  It 
was  a  smallish  man  of  no  particular  color  or 
complexion,  with  that  slight  distortion  of  the 
joints  common  in  a  country  of  leaded  ores. 
By  these  marks,  as  they  discovered  themselves 
in  the  sharp  light,  the  Pocket-Hunter  was  able 
to  identify  him  as  a  man  Shorty  had  never 
seen,  last  heard  of  at  Tres  Pinos,  where  he  had 
fallen  by  rage  into  some  such  seizure  as  had 
apparently  overtaken  him  upon  the  trail. 
That  he  should  be  here  at  all,  and  in  such  a 
case  as  this,  was  sufficiently  horrifying,  but  it 
was  nothing  to  the  appalling  wonder  as  to 
what  had  become  of  Tom. 


LOST   BORDERS 

There  was  the  impress  of  his  body  upon  the 
bed,  and  the  blanket,  shed  in  loose  folds  across 
the  foot,  now  lifted  a  little  and  buoyed  by  the 
wind,  and  in  all  the  wide  day  nothing  to  hide 
a  man,  except  where,  miles  behind,  the  sheer 
bulk  of  Tinpah  was  split  by  shadowy  gulfs  of 
canons.  Shorty  was,  for  the  time,  fairly  totter 
ing  in  his  mind.  He  would  pry  foolishly  about 
the  camp,  getting  back  by  quick  turns  and 
pounces  to  the  stretched  body  on  the  sand,  as 
though  in  the  interim  it  might  have  recovered 
from  its  extraordinary  illusion  and  become  the 
body  of  his  friend  again.  By  degrees  the 
Pocket-Hunter  constrained  him  to  piece  out 
the  probable  circumstance. 

They  had  to  begin,  of  course,  with  Tom's 
not  being  dead,  and  to  go  on  from  that  to  the 
previous  fact  of  Mac  working  his  poor  body 
over  the  long  stretches  between  Tres  Pirios  and 
the  Jawbone,  where  he  must  have  learned  that 
Creelman  was  hiding.  Well,  he  had  a  poor 
body,  and  it  must  have  given  out  under  him 
just  as  he  arrived  in  camp,  very  shortly  after 
Shorty  had  left  it,  and,  over-ridden  by  his  er 
rand,  had  persuaded  Long  Tom,  then  recovering 
from  his  trance  or  swoon,  to  rise  and  go  on 
with  it. 

146 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

1 ' To  kill  Creelman !    Tom  ?' ' 

Shorty's  imagination  flagged  visibly  in  the 
eye  of  Tom's  huge  amiability,  but  the  Pocket- 
Hunter  came  around  triumphantly. 

"Well,  he  went!" 

"But  he  couldn't  have,"  Shorty  put  forward, 
hopefully,  as  if  any  bar  to  his  partner's  leaving 
the  camp  might  somehow  result  in  proving  him 
still  there.  "He  hadn't  stood  on  his  feet  for 
twenty- four  hours,  and  suffered  something  aw 
ful.  Besides,  he  didn't  know  there  was  a 
cabin;  if  he  had,  I'd  have  gone  there  yester 
day." 

"Mac  would  have  told  him,  of  course." 

Shorty  drooped  dejectedly  before  a  supposi 
tion  that,  however  large  the  hope  it  entailed  of 
finding  his  partner  still  in  the  flesh,  afforded 
no  relief  to  the  incontrovertible  persistence  of 
evidence  in  his  own  mind.  "But  he  croaked, 
I  tell  you — they're  dead  when  they  croak,  ain't 
they?" 

Whatever  was  said  to  that  was  said  by  the 
zt-z-z-t  of  desert  flies  punctuating  the  heavy 
heat.  At  the  sound  of  it  little  beads  of  sweat 
broke  out  on  Shorty's  face. 

"Look  a-here,"  he  brought  out,  finally,  "if 
this  other  fellow,  Mac  here,  was  as  bad  off  as 
ii  147 


LOST    BORDERS 

you  say,  why  didn't  Tom  go  to  him;  kind  of 
ease  him  off  like  ?  What  for  did  he  go  off  and 
leave  him  crumpled  up  like  that?" 

"He  wouldn't  have  died  until  after  Tom  left, 
Mac  wouldn't,"  the  Pocket-Hunter  reminded 
him.  "What  makes  you  so  sure?" 

"Tom  never  walked  none  after  we  struck 
camp."  Shorty  was  secure  of  his  ground  here. 
"And  there's  no  tracks  of  him  except  where 
he  came  in  alongside  of  me — and  goin'  out — 
there!"  The  print  of  Tom's  large  feet  had 
turned  toward  the  Jawbone.  "Besides,"  he 
returned  to  it  with  anxiety,  "what  would  he 
go  to  Creelman's  for?" 

This  was  a  point,  and  the  Pocket-Hunter 
took  as  much  time  as  was  necessary  to  shroud 
the  dead  man  in  Tom's  blanket  to  consider  it. 
He  found  this  at  last: 

"Tom,"  he  said,  "was  a  peaceable  man?" 

"None  peaceabler,"  admitted  Tom's  partner. 

"Well,  then,  when  he  found  this  little— "(the 
adjective  checked  out  of  respect  to  the  object 
of  it  being  as  he  was)  "Mac  here  so  set  on 
killing,  he  thought  it  no  more  than  right  to 
get  on  ahead  and  give  Creelman  a  hint  of  what 
was  coming  to  him." 

This  being  so  much  what  might  have  been 
148 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

expected  of  Tom,  it  appeared  insensibly  to  give 
greater  plausibility  to  the  whole  occasion.  It 
left  them  for  the  moment  free  to  set  out  on 
Tom's  trail  with  almost  a  movement  of  natural 
ness.  It  lasted,  however,  only  long  enough  to 
see  them  into  the  steady,  flowing  stride  of 
desert  travel;  the  recurrence  of  that  motion, 
perhaps,  set  up  again  in  Shorty's  mind  the 
consciousness  of  loss  in  which  it  had  some  two 
hours  earlier  begun,  and  the  consideration  of 
mere  practical  details,  such  as  the  distance  from 
the  camp  to  Creelman's,  swept  back  to  the  full 
the  conviction  of  unreality. 

Looking  ahead  at  the  long  trudge  between 
them  and  the  mouth  of  the  canon,  where  in  that 
clear  light,  on  that  level  mesa,  no  man  could 
have  moved  unespied  by  them,  where,  in  fact, 
no  man  at  that  moment  was  moving,  he  broke 
out  in  a  kind  of  exasperated  wail: 

"But  he  couldn't  have,  I  tell  you;  he  couldn't 
have  walked  it.  ...  He  was  dead,  I  tell  you.  .  .  . 
He  croaked  and  I  covered  him  up.  .  .  ." 

It  became  momentarily  clearer  to  the  Pocket- 
Hunter  that  unless  they  came  soon,  behind 
some  screening  weed,  in  some  unguessed  hollow, 
upon  Long  Tom's  huddled  body,  collapsed  in  the 
recurrent  weakness  of  his  disorder,  so  to  restore 
149 


LOST    BORDERS 

the  event  to  reasonableness,  he  must  find  him 
self  swamped  again  in  the  horror  of  the  in 
explicable,  out  of  which  they  had  been  specious 
ly  pulled  by  the  Pocket-Hunter's  argument. 

It  was  not  until  they  came  to  the  loose  shale 
and  sand  at  the  mouth  of  the  canon  that 
Shorty  reverted  again  to  the  form  of  his  amaze 
ment. 

"Did  you  notice,"  said  he,  "anything  queer 
about  Tom's  tracks?" 

"Queer,  how?" 

"Well— different?" 

"Like  he  thought  he  had  a  game  leg?"  sug 
gested  the  Pocket-Hunter. 

"Well,  he  hadn't  ...  but  the  other  man  .  .  . 
back  yonder  .  .  .  he  had  a  game  leg." 

"Shorty!  Shorty!"  the  Pocket-Hunter  fairly 
begged.  "You  ain't  .  .  .  you  mustn't  ...  let 
your  mind  run  on  them  things!" 

"Well,  he  had,"  persisted  Wells.  His  voice 
clicked  with  dryness,  trailed  off  whispering.  It 
seemed  to  the  Pocket-Hunter,  suddenly,  that 
the  twenty  steps  or  so  between  the  man  so 
certainly  dead  in  his  tracks  on  one  side  the 
fire  back  there,  and  the  supposedly  dead  arising 
in  his  on  the  other,  had  swelled  to  immeasurable 
space.  It  was  then  there  came  into  his  mind 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

the  remainder  of  that  singular  obsession  of  the 
trail  in  the  notice  of  which  our  conversation 
had  begun.  He  saw  on  the  instant  Mac  inch 
ing  out  from  Tres  Pinos  on  his  unmatched  poor 
legs,  his  hate  riding  far  before  him,  blown 
forward  by  some  devil's  blast,  tugging  at  him 
like  a  kite  at  its  ballast,  lifting  him  past  in 
credible  stretches  of  hot  sand  and  cutting  stone, 
until  it  dropped  him  there.  He  wrenched  his 
mind  away  from  that  by  an  effort,  and  fixed  it 
on  the  pale  pine-colored  square  of  Creelman's 
cabin,  where  it  began  to  show  in  the  shadowy 
gulf  of  the  canon. 

The  door  was  open  and  the  curtains  of  the 
two  small  windows  on  either  side  half  drawn 
against  a  glare  which  would  have  been  gone  from 
that  side  of  the  canon  more  than  an  hour  ago. 
Here,  as  they  halted  to  take  notice  of  it,  some 
expiring  gasps  of  bluish  smoke  from  Creelman's 
breakfast  fire  went  up  from  the  tin  chimney 
against  the  basalt  wall.  As  they  came  near 
they  observed  a  large  flaccid  hand  hanging  out 
over  the  sill.  What  they  made  out  further 
was  Creelman's  body,  extended  face  downward, 
barring  the  door.  A  small  lizard  tic-tacked 
on  the  unpainted  boards  across  the  hand  that 
did  not  start  at  it,  and  disappeared  into  the 


LOST    BORDERS 

shadow  of  the  room,  where,  as  if  this  intrusion 
gave  them  leave  to  look,  they  perceived  among 
the  broken  plates  and  disordered  furniture  a 
broken  pack-stick,  Creelman's  knife,  open  and 
blooded — the  figure  of  Long  Tom,  half  propped 
against  the  footboard  of  the  bunk,  dropping 
weakly  from  a  wound.  It  was  Tom,  though 
over  his  face  as  it  leered  up  at  them  was  spread 
a  strange  new  expressiveness,  such  a  superficial 
and  furtive  change  as  frivolous  passers-by  will 
add  sometimes  to  the  face  of  a  poster  with 
pencil  touches,  provoking  to  half  -  startled 
laughter;  plain  enough  to  have  shocked  them 
back,  even  as  against  the  witness  of  clothes  and 
hair  and  features,  from  the  instant's  recogni 
tion,  to  produce  in  them  an  amazement,  mo 
mentary,  yet  long  enough  for  the  dying  man 
to  take  note  of  them  unfriendlily,  and  to  have 
addressed  himself  to  the  Pocket-Hunter. 

"Came    to    see    the    fight,    did    you?     It's 
damned  well  over  .  .  .  but  I  did  for  him  .  .  .  the 

,  ,  !"  His  body  sank  visibly  with 

the  stream  of  curses. 

But  the  faith  of  Shorty  was  proof  even  against 
this.     He  had  cleared  the  body  of  Creelmanat 
a  stride,  and  was  on  his  knees  beside  his  part 
ner,  crying  very  simply. 
152 


THE   POCKET-HUNTER'S   STORY 

"Oh,  Tom,  Tom,"  he  begged,  "you  never 
done  it?  Say  you  never  done  it,  pardner,  say 
you  never!" 

"Aw,  who  the  hell  are  you?"  The  lewd  eyes 
rolled  up  at  him,  he  gave  two  or  three  long 
gasps  which  ended  in  a  short  choking  gurgle, 
the  body  started  slightly,  and  dropped. 

"Come  away,  Shorty,  he's  croaked,"  said  the 
Pocket-Hunter  not  unkindly;  but  Shorty  knelt 
on  there,  crying  quietly  as  he  watched  the  dead 
man's  features  settle  and  stiffen  to  the  likeness 
of  his  friend. 


XI 

THE    READJUSTMENT 

EMMA  JEFFRIES  had  been  dead  and 
buried  three  days.  The  sister  who  had 
come  to  the  funeral  had  taken  Emma's  child 
away  with  her,  and  the  house  was  swept  and 
aired;  then,  when  it  seemed  there  was  least 
occasion  for  it,  Emma  came  back.  The  neigh 
bor  woman  who  had  nursed  her  was  the  first 
to  know  it.  It  was  about  seven  of  the  evening 
in  a  mellow  gloom:  the  neighbor  woman  was 
sitting  on  her  own  stoop  with  her  arms  wrapped 
in  her  apron,  and  all  at  once  she  found  herself 
going  along  the  street  under  an  urgent  sense 
that  Emma  needed  her.  She  was  half-way 
dowp.  the  block  before  she  recollected  that  this 
was  impossible,  for  Mrs.  Jeffries  was  dead  and 
buried;  but  as  soon  as  she  came  opposite  the 
house  she  was  aware  of  what  had  happened. 
It  was  all  open  to  the  summer  air;  except  that 


THE    READJUSTMENT 

it  was  a  little  neater,  not  otherwise  than  the 
rest  of  the  street.  It  was  quite  dark;  but  the 
presence  of  Emma  Jeffries  streamed  from  it  and 
betrayed  it  more  than  a  candle.  It  streamed 
out  steadily  across  the  garden,  and  even  as  it 
reached  her,  mixed  with  the  smell  of  the  damp 
mignonette,  the  neighbor  woman  owned  to  her 
self  that  she  had  always  known  Emma  would 
come  back. 

"A  sight  stranger  if  she  wouldn't,"  thought 
the  woman  who  had  nursed  her.  "She  wasn't 
ever  one  to  throw  off  things  easily." 

Emma  Jeffries  had  taken  death  as  she  had 
taken  everything  in  life,  hard.  She  had  met 
it  with  the  same  bright,  surface  competency 
that  she  had  presented  to  the  squalor  of  the 
encompassing  desertness,  to  the  insuperable 
commonness  of  Sim  Jeffries,  to  the  affliction  of 
her  crippled  child;  and  the  intensity  of  her 
wordless  struggle  against  it  had  caught  the  at 
tention  of  the  townspeople  and  held  it  in  a 
shocked  curious  awe.  She  was  so  long  a-dying, 
lying  there  in  that  little  low  house,  hearing  the 
abhorred  footsteps  going  about  her  rooms  and 
the  vulgar  procedure  of  the  community  encroach 
upon  her  like  the  advances  of  the  sand  wastes 
on  an  unwatered  field.  For  Emma  had  always 
155 


LOST    BORDERS 

wanted  things  different,  wanted  them  with  a 
fury  of  intentness  that  implied  offensiveness  in 
things  as  they  were.  And  the  townspeople  had 
taken  offence,  the  more  so  because  she  was  not 
to  be  surprised  in  any  inaptitude  for  their  own 
kind  of  success.  Do  what  you  could,  you  could 
never  catch  Emma  Jeffries  in  a  wrapper  after 
three  o'clock  in  the  afternoon.  And  she  would 
never  talk  about  the  child — in  a  country  where 
so  little  ever  happened  that  even  trouble  was 
a  godsend  if  it  gave  you  something  to  talk  about. 
It  was  reported  that  she  did  not  even  talk  to  Sim. 
But  there  the  common  resentment  got  back 
at  her.  If  she  had  thought  to  effect  anything 
with  Sim  Jeffries  against  the  benumbing  spirit 
of  the  place,  the  evasive  hopefulness,  the  large 
sense  of  leisure  that  ungirt  the  loins,  if  she  still 
hoped  somehow  to  get  away  with  him  to  some 
place  for  which  by  her  dress,  by  her  manner, 
she  seemed  forever  and  unassailably  fit,  it  was 
foregone  that  nothing  would  come  of  it.  They 
knew  Sim  Jeffries  better  than  that.  Yet  so 
vivid  had  been  the  force  of  her  wordless  dis 
satisfaction  that  when  the  fever  took  her  and 
she  went  down  like  a  pasteboard  figure  in  the 
damp,  the  wonder  was  that  nothing  toppled 
with  her.  And,  as  if  she  too  had  felt  her- 

156 


THE   READJUSTMENT 

self  indispensable,  Emma  Jeffries  had  come 
back. 

The  neighbor  woman  crossed  the  street,  and 
as  she  passed  the  far  corner  of  the  garden, 
Jeffries  spoke  to  her.  He  had  been  standing, 
she  did  not  know  how  long  a  time,  behind  the 
syringa-bush,  and  moved  even  with  her  along 
the  fence  until  they  came  to  the  gate.  She 
could  see  in  the  dusk  that  before  speaking  he 
wet  his  lips  with  his  tongue. 

"She's  in  there,"  he  said,  at  last. 

"Emma?" 

He  nodded.  "I  been  sleeping  at  the  store 
since — but  I  thought  I'd  be  more  comforta 
ble  —  as  soon  as  I  opened  the  door  there  she 
was." 

"Did  you  see  her?" 

"No." 

"How  do  you  know,  then?" 

"Don't  you  know?" 

The  neighbor  felt  there  was  nothing  to  say 
to  that. 

"Come  in,"  he  whispered,  huskily.  They 
slipped  by  the  rose-tree  and  the  wistaria,  and  sat 
down  on  the  porch  at  the  side.  A  door  swung 
inward  behind  them.  They  felt  the  Presence 
in  the  dusk  beating  like  a  pulse. 


LOST   BORDERS 

' '  What  do  you  think  she  wants  ? "  said  Jeffries. 
"Do  you  reckon  it's  the  boy?" 

"Like  enough." 

"He's  better  off  with  his  aunt.  There  was 
no  one  here  to  take  care  of  him  like  his  mother 
wanted."  He  raised  his  voice  unconsciously 
with  a  note  of  justification,  addressing  the  room 
behind. 

"I  am  sending  fifty  dollars  a  month,"  he 
said;  "he  can  go  with  the  best  of  them." 

He  went  on  at  length  to  explain  all  the  ad 
vantage  that  was  to  come  to  the  boy  from 
living  at  Pasadena,  and  the  neighbor  woman 
bore  him  out  in  it. 

"He  was  glad  to  go,"  urged  Jeffries  to  the 
room.  "He  said  it  was  what  his  mother  would 
have  wanted." 

They  were  silent  then  a  long  time,  while  the 
Presence  seemed  to  swell  upon  them  and  en 
croached  upon  the  garden. 

Finally,  "I  gave  Ziegler  the  order  for  the 
monument  yesterday, ' '  Jeffries  threw  out,  appeas- 
ingly.  "It's  to  cost  three  hundred  and  fifty." 

The  Presence  stirred.  The  neighbor  thought 
she  could  fairly  see  the  controlled  tolerance 
with  which  Emma  Jeffries  endured  the  evidence 
of  Sim's  ineptitudes. 


THE    READJUSTMENT 

They  sat  on  helplessly  without  talking  after 
that  until  the  woman's  husband  came  to  the 
fence  and  called  her. 

"Don't  go,"  begged  Sim. 

"Hush,"  she  said.  "Do  you  want  all  the 
town  to  know?  You  had  naught  but  good 
from  Emma  living,  and  no  call  to  expect  harm 
from  her  now.  It's  natural  she  should  come 
back — if — if  she  was  lonesome  like — in — the 
place  where  she's  gone  to." 

"Emma  wouldn't  come  back  to  this  place," 
Jeffries  protested,  "without  she  wanted  some 
thing." 

"Well,  then,  you've  got  to  find  out,"  said  the 
neighbor  woman. 

All  the  next  day  she  saw,  whenever  she  passed 
the  house,  that  Emma  was  still  there.  It  was 
shut  and  barred,  but  the  Presence  lurked  behind 
the  folded  blinds  and  fumbled  at  the  doors. 
When  it  was  night  and  the  moths  began  in  the 
columbine  under  the  windows,  it  went  out  and 
walked  in  the  garden. 

Jeffries  was  waiting  at  the  gate  when  the 
neighbor  woman  came.  He  sweated  with  help 
lessness  in  the  warm  dusk,  and  the  Presence 
brooded  upon  them  like  an  apprehension  that 
grows  by  being  entertained. 


LOST   BORDERS 

''She  wants  something,"  he  appealed,  "but 
I  can't  make  out  what.  Emma  knows  she  is 
welcome  to  everything  I've  got.  Everybody 
knows  I've  been  a  good  provider." 

The  neighbor  woman  remembered  suddenly 
the  only  time  she  had  ever  drawn  close  to  Emma 
Jeffries  touching  the  boy.  They  had  sat  up 
with  it  together  all  one  night  in  some  childish 
ailment,  and  she  had  ventured  a  question. 
"What  does  his  father  think?"  And  Emma 
had  turned  her  a  white,  hard  face  of  surpassing 
dreariness. 

"I  don't  know,"  she  admitted,  "he  never 
says." 

"There's  more  than  providing,"  suggested 
the  neighbor  woman. 

"Yes.  There's  feeling  .  .  .  but  she  had 
enough  to  do  to  put  up  with  me.  I  had  no  call 
to  be  troubling  her  with  such."  He  left  off  to 
mop  his  forehead,  and  began  again. 

"Feelings!"  he  said,  "there's  times  a  man 
gets  so  wore  out  with  feelings  he  doesn't  have 
them  any  more." 

He  talked,  and  presently  it  grew  clear  to  the 

woman  that  he  was  voiding  all  the  stuff  of  his 

life,  as  if  he  had  sickened  on  it  and  was  now  done. 

It  was  a  little  soul  knowing  itself  and  not  good 

1 60 


THE    READJUSTMENT 

to  see.  What  was  singular  was  that  the  Presence 
left  off  walking  in  the  garden,  came  and  caught 
like  a  gossamer  on  the  ivy-tree,  swayed  by  the 
breath  of  his  broken  sentences.  He  talked, 
and  the  neighbor  woman  saw  him  for  once  as  he 
saw  himself  and  Emma,  snared  and  floundering 
in  an  inexplicable  unhappiness.  He  had  been 
disappointed,  too.  She  had  never  relished  the 
man  he  was,  and  it  made  him  ashamed.  That 
was  why  he  had  never  gone  away,  lest  he  should 
make  her  ashamed  among  her  own  kind.  He 
was  her  husband,  he  could  not  help  that  though 
he  was  sorry  for  it.  But  he  could  keep  the 
offence  where  least  was  made  of  it.  And  there 
was  a  child — she  had  wanted  a  child ;  but  even 
then  he  had  blundered — begotten  a  cripple 
upon  her.  He  blamed  himself  utterly,  searched 
out  the  roots  of  his  youth  for  the  answer  to  that, 
until  the  neighbor  woman  flinched  to  hear  him. 
But  the  Presence  stayed. 

He  had  never  talked  to  his  wife  about  the 
child.  How  should  he  ?  There  was  the  fact — 
the  advertisement  of  his  incompetence.  And 
she  had  never  talked  to  him.  That  was  the  one 
blessed  and  unassailable  memory;  that  she  had 
spread  silence  like  a  balm  over  his  hurt.  In 
return  for  it  he  had  never  gone  away.  He  had 
161 


LOST    BORDERS 

resisted  her  that  he  might  save  her  from  showing 
among  her  own  kind  how  poor  a  man  he  was. 
With  every  word  of  this  ran  the  fact  of  his  love 
for  her — as  he  had  loved  her,  with  all  the  stripes 
of  clean  and  uncleanness.  He  bared  himself 
as  a  child  without  knowing;  and  the  Presence 
stayed.  The  talk  trailed  off  at  last  to  the 
commonplaces  of  consolation  between  the 
retchings  of  his  spirit.  The  Presence  lessened 
and  streamed  toward  them  on  the  wind  of  the 
garden.  When  it  touched  them  like  the  warm 
air  of  noon  that  lies  sometimes  in  hollow  places 
after  nightfall,  the  neighbor  woman  rose  and 
went  away. 

The  next  night  she  did  not  wait  for  him. 
When  a  rod  outside  the  town — it  was  a  very 
little  one — the  burrowing  owls  whoo-whooed, 
she  hung  up  her  apron  and  went  to  talk  with 
Emma  Jeffries.  The  Presence  was  there,  drawn 
in,  lying  close.  She  found  the  key  between  the 
wistaria  and  the  first  pillar  of  the  porch,  but  as 
soon  as  she  opened  the  door  she  felt  the  chill 
that  might  be  expected  by  one  intruding  on 
Emma  Jeffries  in  her  own  house. 

"  'The  Lord  is  my  shepherd/  "  said  the  neigh 
bor  woman ;  it  was  the  first  religious  phrase  that 
occurred  to  her;  then  she  said  the  whole  of  the 
162 


THE    READJUSTMENT 

psalm  and  after  that  a  hymn.  She  had  come  in 
through  the  door  and  stood  with  her  back  to  it 
and  her  hand  upon  the  knob.  Everything  was 
just  as  Mrs.  Jeffries  had  left  it,  with  the  waiting 
air  of  a  room  kept  for  company. 

"Em,"  she  said,  boldly,  when  the  chill  had 
abated  a  little  before  the  sacred  words.  "Em 
Jeffries,  I've  got  something  to  say  to  you. 
And  you've  got  to  hear,"  she  added  with  firm 
ness,  as  the  white  curtains  stirred  duskily  at 
the  window.  "You  wouldn't  be  talked  to 
about  your  troubles  when  .  .  .  you  were  here 
before;  and  we  humored  you.  But  now  there 
is  Sim  to  be  thought  of.  I  guess  you  heard 
what  you  came  for  last  night,  and  got  good  of  it. 
Maybe  it  would  have  been  better  if  Sim  had  said 
things  all  along  instead  of  hoarding  them  in  his 
heart,  but  any  way  he  has  said  them  now.  And 
what  I  want  to  say  is,  if  you  was  staying  on 
with  the  hope  of  hearing  it  again,  you'd  be  mak 
ing  a  mistake.  You  was  an  uncommon  woman, 
Emma  Jeffries,  and  there  didn't  none  of  us 
understand  you  very  well,  nor  do  you  justice 
maybe ;  but  Sim  is  only  a  common  man,  and  I 
understand  him  because  I'm  that  way  myself. 
And  if  you  think  he'll  be  opening  his  heart  to 
you  every  night,  or  be  any  different  from  what 

ia  163 


LOST    BORDERS 

he's  always  been  on  acount  of  what's  happened, 
that's  a  mistake  too  .  .  .  and  in  a  little  while,  if 
you  stay,  it  will  be  as  bad  as  it  always  was  .  .  . 
Men  are  like  that.  .  .  .  You'd  better  go  now 
while  there's  understanding  between  you."  She 
stood  staring  into  the  darkling  room  that  seemed 
suddenly  full  of  turbulence  and  denial.  It 
seemed  to  beat  upon  her  and  take  her  breath, 
but  she  held  on. 

"You've  got  to  go  ...  Em  .  .  .  and  I'm  going 
to  stay  until  you  do."  She  said  this  with 
finality,  and  then  began  again. 

"  'The  Lord  is  nigh  unto  them  that  are  of  a 
broken  heart,'  "  and  repeated  the  passage  to 
the  end.  Then  as  the  Presence  sank  before  it. 
"You  better  go,  Emma,"  persuasively,  and  again 
after  an  interval: 

"  'He  shall  deliver  thee  in  six  troubles,  yea,  in 
seven  shall  no  evil  touch  thce. ' ' 

.  .  .  The  Presence  gathered  itself  and  was  still. 
She  could  make  out  that  it  stood  over  against 
the  opposite  corner  by  the  gilt  easel  with  the 
crayon  portrait  of  the  child. 

.  .  .  "'  For  thou  shalt  forget  thy  misery.  Thou 
shalt  remember  it  as  waters  that  are  past,' ' 
concluded  the  neighbor  woman,  as  she  heard 
Jeffries    on    the    gravel    outside.     What    the 

164 


THE    READJUSTMENT 

Presence  had  wrought  upon  him  in  the  night  was 
visible  in  his  altered  mien.  He  looked  more 
than  anything  else  to  be  in  need  of  sleep.  He 
had  eaten  his  sorrow,  and  that  was  the  end  of  it 
— as  it  is  with  men. 

"I  came  to  see  if  there  was  anything  I  could 
do  for  you,"  said  the  woman,  neighborly,  with 
her  hand  upon  the  door. 

"I  don't  know  as  there  is,"  said  he;  "I'm 
much  obliged,  but  I  don't  know  as  there  is." 

"You  see,"  whispered  the  woman  over  her 
shoulder,  "not  even  to  me."  She  felt  the  tug 
of  her  heart  as  the  Presence  swept  past  her. 

The  neighbor  went  out  after  that  and  walked 
in  the  ragged  street,  past  the  school-house, 
across  the  creek  below  the  town,  out  by  the 
fields,  over  the  headgate,  and  back  by  the  town 
again.  It  was  full  nine  of  the  clock  when  she 
passed  the  Jeffries  house.  It  looked,  except  for 
being  a  little  neater,  not  other  than  the  rest  of 
the  street.  The  door  was  open  and  the  lamp 
was  lit;  she  saw  Jeffries,  black  against  it.  He 
sat  reading  in  a  book,  like  a  man  at  ease  in  his 
own  house. 


L° 


XII 

BITTERNESS   OF    WOMEN 

4 

C)UIS  CHABOT  was  sitting  under  the  fig- 
tree  in  her  father's  garden  at  Tres  Pirios 
when  he  told  Marguerita  Dupre"  that  he  could 
not  love  her.  This  sort  of  thing  happened  so 
often  to  Louis  that  he  did  it  very  well  and 
rather  enjoyed  it,  for  he  was  one  of  those  be 
fore  whom  women  bloomed  instinctively  and 
preened  themselves ;  and  that  Marguerita  loved 
him  very  much  was  known  not  only  to  Louis 
but  to  all  Tres  Pinos. 

It  was  bright  mid-afternoon,  and  there  was 
no  sound  in  Dupre 's  garden  louder  than  the 
dropping  of  ripe  figs  and  the  drip  of  the  hydrant 
under  the  Castilian  roses.  A  mile  out  of  town 
Chabot's  flock  dozed  on  their  feet,  with  their 
heads  under  one  another's  bellies,  and  his 
herders  dozed  on  the  ground,  with  their  heads 
under  the  plaited  tops  of  the  sage.  Old  Dupre" 
1 66 


BITTERNESS   OF   WOMEN 

sat  out  in  front  of  his  own  front  yard  with  a 
handkerchief  over  his  face,  and  slept  very 
soundly.  Chabot  finished  his  claret  to  the  last 
drop  (it  was  excellent  claret,  this  ot  Dupr6's), 
turned  the  tumbler  upside  down,  sat  back  in 
his  chair,  and  explained  to  Marguerita  point  by 
point  why  he  did  not  love  her. 

Marguerita  leaned  her  fat  arms  on  the  table, 
wrapped  in  her  blue  reboza ;  it  was  light  blue, 
and  she  was  too  dark  for  it;  but  it  was  such 
a  pretty  color.  She  leaned  forward,  looking 
steadily  and  quietly  at  Louis,  because  she  was 
afraid  if  she  so  much  as  let  her  lids  droop  the 
tears  would  come,  and  if  she  smiled  her  lips 
would  quiver.  Marguerita  felt  that  she  had 
not  invited  this,  neither  had  she  known  how  to 
avoid  it.  She  would  have  given  anything  to 
have  told  Louis  to  his  face  that  he  need  not 
concern  himself  so  much  on  her  account,  as 
she  was  not  the  least  interested  in  him;  she 
had  called  on  all  her  pride  to  that  end,  but 
nothing  came. 

She  was  a  good  girl,  Louis  told  her,  such  as, 
if  she  had  pleased  him,  he  would  gladly  have 
married.  She  was  a  very  good  girl,  and  she 
understood  about  sheep.  Tres  -  bien  !  Old 
Dupre  had  taught  her  that;  but  she  lacked  a 
167 


LOST    BORDERS 

trifle — a  nuance — but  everything  where  love  is 
concerned,  Vart  d'etre  dtsire,  explained  the  lit 
tle  Frenchman ;  for  though  he  was  only  a  sheep- 
herder  of  Lost  Borders,  if  he  had  been  a  boule- 
vardier  he  could  not  have  been  more  of  a 
Frenchman  nor  less  of  a  cad.  He  leaned  back 
in  his  chair  with  the  air  of  having  delivered 
himself  very  well. 

''Salty  Bill  loves  me,"  ventured  Marguerita. 

"Eh,  Bill!"  Louis  looked  hurt,  for  though 
he  frequently  disposed  of  his  ladies  in  this 
negligent  fashion,  he  did  not  care  to  have  them 
snapped  up  so  quickly.  Marguerita  felt  con 
victed  of  lese-majeste  by  the  look,  and  hastened 
to  reassure  him  that  she  cared  nothing  what 
ever  for  Salty  Bill.  It  was  a  false  move,  and 
she  knew  it  as  soon  as  it  was  done;  but  she 
could  not  bear  to  have  Louis  look  at  her  like 
that,  and  Marguerita  had  never  in  her  life 
learned  the  good  of  pretending.  Chabot  poured 
him  another  glass  of  claret,  and  returned  to  his 
point. 

There  was  Suzon  Moynier,  he  explained. 
Such  an  eye  as  Suzon  had!  there  was  a  spark 
for  you !  And  an  ankle !  more  lovers  than  few 
had  been  won  by  an  ankle.  Marguerita,  under 
cover  of  the  table,  drew  her  feet  together  be- 
168 


BITTERNESS   OF   WOMEN 

neath  her  skirts.  Her  ankles  were  thick,  and 
there  was  no  disguising  it. 

"So  it  is  Suzon  you  love?" 

"Eh,"  said  the  herder,  "that  is  as  may  be. 
I  have  loved  many  women."  Then  perhaps 
because  the  particular  woman  did  not  matter 
so  much  as  that  there  should  be  womanhood, 
and  perhaps  because  he  could  no  more  help  it 
than  she  could  help  being  wondrously  flooded 
by  it,  he  threw  her  a  look  from  the  tail  of  his 
eye  and  such  a  smile  as  drew  all  the  blood 
from  her  heart,  bent  above  her,  brushing  her 
hair  with  his  lips  in  such  a  lingering  tender 
ness  of  farewell,  that  though  he  had  just  told 
her  she  was  not  to  be  loved,  the  poor  girl  was 
not  sure  but  he  was  beginning  to  love  her. 
Women  suffered  things  like  that  from  Louis 
Chabot,  each  being  perfectly  sure  she  was  the 
only  one,  and  perhaps,  like  Marguerita,  finding 
it  worth  while  to  be  made  to  suffer  if  it  could 
be  done  so  exquisitely.  - 

Marguerita  was  only  half  French  herself,  old 
Dupre  having  married  her  mother,  Senorita 
Carrasco,  who  was  only  half  a  senorita,  since, 
in  fact,  most  people  in  Tres  Pinos  were  a  little 
this  or  that,  with  no  chance  for  name-calling. 
Dupre  had  been  a  herder  of  sheep,  risen  to  an 
169 


LOST   BORDERS 

owner  whom  the  Desert  had  bitten.  The 
natural  consequence  was  that  when  he  was  old, 
instead  of  returning  to  France,  he  had  mar 
ried  Marguerita's  mother,  and  settled  down 
in  Tres  Pinos  to  live  on  the  interest  of  his 
money. 

It  was  a  fact  that  his  daughter  had  at  heart 
all  the  fire  and  tenderness  that  promised  in 
Suzon's  glance;  but  of  what  use  to  Louis 
Chabot  that  she  had  a  soul  warm  and  alight 
if  no  glow  of  it  suffused  her  cheek  and  no  spark 
of  it  drew  him  in  her  eye.  She  was  swart hy 
and  heavy  of  face;  she  had  no  figure,  which 
means  she  had  a  great  deal  too  much  of  it, 
and  there  was  a  light  shadow,  like  a  finger- 
smudge,  on  her  upper  lip.  Not  that  the  girl 
did  not  have  her  good  points.  She  could  cook, 
that  was  the  French  strain  in  her  father;  she 
could  dance,  that  was  Castilian  from  her 
mother;  and  such  as  she  was  Salty  Bill  wanted 
her.  Bill  drove  an  eighteen-mule  team  for  the 
borax  works  and  was  seven  times  a  better  man 
than  Chabot,  but  she  would  have  no  more  of 
him  than  Louis  would  have  cf  her.  She  con 
tinued  to  say  her  prayers  regularly,  and  told 
Tia  Juana,  who  reproached  her  with  losing  a 
good  marriage,  that  she  believed  yet  the  saints 
170 


BITTERNESS   OF   WOMEN 

would  give  her  the  desire  of  her  heart,  whereat 
Tia  Juana  pitied  her. 

Chabot  brought  his  sheep  up  from  the  spring 
shearing  at  Bakersfield  each  year,  and  made 
three  loops  about  Tres  Pinos,  so  that  it  brought 
him  to  the  town  about  once  in  three  months 
to  replenish  his  supplies,  and  the  only  reason 
there  was  not  a  new  object  of  his  attentions 
each  time  was  that  there  were  not  girls  enough, 
for  Chabot's  taste  required  them  young,  pretty, 
and  possessed  of  the  difficult  art  of  being  de 
sired.  Therefore,  he  had  time  to  keep  hope 
alive  in  Marguerita  with  the  glint  of  his  flatter 
ing  eyes  and  the  trick  of  his  flattering  lips, 
which  was  such  very  common  coin  with  him 
that  he  did  not  quite  know  himself  how  free 
he  was  with  it.  And  after  old  Dupre  died  and 
his  daughter  inherited  his  house  and  the  in 
terest  on  his  money,  she  was  enough  of  a  figure 
in  Tres  Pinos  to  make  a  little  attention  worth 
while,  even  though  she  had  a  smudge  of  black 
on  her  upper  lip  and  no  art  but  that  of  being 
faithful.  She  lived  in  the  house  under  the  fig- 
tree  with  old  Tia  Juana  for  a  companion,  and 
was  much  respected.  She  was  said  to  have 
more  clothes  than  anybody,  though  they  never 
became  her. 

171 


LOST    BORDERS 

Marguerita  kept  a  candle  burning  before  the 
saints  and  another  in  her  heart  for  the  hand 
some  little  herder  who  went  on  making  love 
to  ladies  and  being  loved  by  them  for  three 
years.  Then  the  saints  took  a  hand  in  his 
affairs,  though,  of  course,  it  did  not  look  that 
way  to  Louis. 

He  was  sleeping  out  on  Black  Mountain  in 
the  spring  of  the  year  with  his  flock.  The 
herder  whose  business  it  was  to  have  done  that 
was  at  Tres  Pinos  on  a  two  days'  leave,  con 
fessing  himself,  and  getting  a  nice,  jolly  little 
claret  drunk.  Somewhere  up  in  the  blown 
lava-holes  of  Black  Mountain  there  was  a  bear 
with  two  cubs,  who  had  said  to  them,  bear 
fashion:  "Come  down  to  the  flock  with  me  to 
night,  and  I  will  show  you  how  killing  is  done. 
There  will  be  dogs  there  and  men;  but  do  not 
be  afraid,  I  will  see  to  it  that  they  do  not  hurt 
you." 

Along  about  the  time  Orion's  sword  sloped 
down  the  west,  Chabot  heard  their  gruntled 
noises  and  the  scurry  of  the  flock.  Chabot 
was  not  a  coward;  perhaps  because  he  knew 
that  in  general  bears  are;  he  got  up  and  kid 
about  him  with  his  staff.  This  he  never  would 
have  done  if  he  had  known  about  the  cubs; 
172 


BITTERNESS   OF   WOMEN 

he  trod  on  the  foot  of  one  in  the  dark,  and  the 
bear  mother  heard  it.  She  came  lumbering 
up  in  the  soft  blackness  and  took  Chabot  in 
her  arms. 

Toward  four  of  the  next  afternoon,  the 
herder  coming  back,  still  very  merry  and  very 
comfortable  in  his  mind,  found  a  maimed, 
bleeding  thing  by  the  water-hole  that  moaned 
and  babbled.  One  of  its  arms  was  gone  to  the 
elbow,  its  face  was  laid  open,  and  long,  red 
gashes  lay  along  its  sides  and  down  one  thigh. 
After  a  while,  when  he  had  washed  away  the 
blood  and  dust,  he  discovered  that  this  thing 
was  Chabot.  The  herder  laid  it  as  tenderly  as 
he  could  on  the  camp  burro  and  took  it  in  to 
Tres  Pinos.  If  there  was  any  question  of  the 
propriety  of  the  care  of  Chabot  falling  to  Mar- 
guerita  Dupre,  it  counted  for  nothing  against 
the  fact  that  nobody  was  found  willing  to  do 
it  in  her  stead,  and  Marguerita  was  very  dis 
creet.  Tia  Juana  was  put  in  charge  of  the 
sick-room,  and  Marguerita  gave  her  whole  soul 
to  the  cooking. 

And  if  any  question  had  arisen  later  when 
Chabot  began  to  hobble  about  with  a  crutch 
under  his  good  arm,  and  his  sleeve  pinned  up 
where  the  other  had  been,  he  put  an  end  to  it 


LOST    BORDERS 

by  marrying  her.  He  was  thought  to  have 
done  very  well  in  this,  since  he  could  get  no 
more  good  of  himself;  and  since  Marguerita 
wanted  him  it  was  a  handsome  way  of  paying 
her,  but  there  had  something  gone  before  that. 
Tia  Juana  had  been  careful  there  should  be 
no  scrap  of  a  mirror  about  when  Chabot  began 
to  slip  his  bandages,  and  perhaps  he  had  not 
had  the  courage  to  ask  for  it;  certainly  there 
had  been  no  change  in  Marguerita's  face  for 
any  change  she  saw  in  him.  And  the  day  that 
he  knew  the  thing  he  was,  he  asked  her  to 
marry  him.  He  had  slipped  out  into  the  street 
for  the  first  time,  wearying  a  little  of  the  solicita 
tions  of  the  two  women,  and,  to  say  truth,  wholly 
misinterpreting  Marguerita's  reasons  for  screen 
ing  him  so  much  from  the  public  gaze,  for  she, 
poor  girl,  when  he  had  asked  her,  could  only  tell 
him  that  he  was  quite  as  handsome  as  ever  in 
her  eyes.  He  felt  the  pleasant  tingle  of  the 
air  and  the  sun  and  the  smell  of  grapes  and 
dropping  leafage  from  the  little  arbors  of  Tres 
Pinos,  and  at  the  turn  of  the  street  in  old 
Moynier's  garden  the  flirt  of  skirts  and  the  grace 
ful  reach  of  young  round  arms.  Louis  straight 
ened  himself  on  his  crutches ;  he  felt  the  stir  and 
excitement  of  the  game  ...  he  was  divided  be- 


BITTERNESS   OF    WOMEN 

tween  his  old  swagger  and  the  pathetic  droop 
of  weakness  ...  he  swung  slowly  past  the 
garden,  and  suddenly  Suzon  looked  up  ... 
looked  dully  at  first  .  .  .  with  dawning  recogni 
tion.  Then  she  threw  her  apron  over  her  face 
and  shrieked,  and  fled  into  the  house.  There 
was  something  more  than  coquetry  in  the  way 
she  ran. 

Louis  turned  into  the  lane  and  sat  down 
under  the  black  sage,  he  was  not  so  strong  as 
he  had  thought,  and  tried  to  be  quite  clear  in 
his  mind  what  this  should  mean.  In  a  little 
while  he  was  quite  clear.  Some  children  play 
ing  in  the  dust  of  the  roadway  at  his  approach 
had  scuttled  away  like  quail,  and  now  he  heard 
behind  him  the  rustle  of  the  sage,  the  intima 
tion  of  hunched  shoulders  and  fingers  held  over 
giggles  of  irrepressible  excitement  as  they  dared 
one  another  to  come  and  peek  at  a  fearsome 
thing. 

It  was  that  afternoon,  when  she  came  in  with 
his  soup  and  claret,  that  he  asked  Marguer- 
ita.  The  poor  girl  put  down  the  bowl,  and 
came  and  knelt  by  him  very  humble  and 
gentle. 

"Are  you  quite  sure,  Louis?"  she  asked,  with 
her  cheek  upon  his  hand. 
'75 


LOST   BORDERS 

"I  am  sure  of  nothing,"  said  he,  "except  that 
I  cannot  live  without  you." 

It  was  very  curious  that  no  sooner  had  he 
said  that  than  he  began  to  discover  it  would 
be  very  hard  to  live  with  her;  for  to  lose  an 
ear  and  an  eye  and  to  have  one's  mouth 
drawn  twisty  by  a  scar  does  not  make  a  kiss 
relish  better  if  it  falls  not  in  with  the  natural 
desire. 

Marguerita  did  not  grow  any  prettier  after 
she  was  married,  but  showed  a  tendency  to 
take  on  fat,  and  she  did  not  dress  quite  so  well 
because  she  could  not  afford  it,  though  there 
are  times,  as,  for  instance,  when  he  has  gone 
out  in  company  and  seen  the  young  married 
women  hustled  out  of  sight  of  his  scars,  that 
her  plain  face  looks  almost  good  to  him.  Mar 
guerita  insists  on  their  going  out  a  great  deal, 
to  cock-fights  and  to  bbiles,  where  he  sits  in 
the  corner  with  his  good  side  carefully  disposed 
toward  the  guests,  and  his  wife  has  given  up 
dancing,  though  she  is  very  fond  of  it,  to  sit 
beside  him  and  keep  him  company ;  though,  to 
tell  the  truth,  Chabot  could  bear  very  well  to 
do  without  that  if  only  he  could  find  himself 
surrounded  by  the  lightness,  the  laughter,  the 
half-revealing  draperies,  the  delicious  disputed 
176 


BITTERNESS   OF    WOMEN 

moves  of  the  game  he  loves — as  he  will  not  any 
more,  for  he  knows  now  that  such  as  these  are 
not  given  save  when  there  is  something  to  be 
got  by  them,  and  though  he  is  only  thirty-four, 
poor  Louis  is  no  longer  possessed  of  Vart  etre 
desire. 

For  the  rest  of  his  life  he  will  have  to  make 
the  best  of  knowing  that  his  wife  carries  his 
name  with  credit,  and  does  not  cost  him  any 
thing.  They  are  not  without  their  comfortable 
hours.  Marguerita  takes  excellent  care  of  him, 
and  she  understands  about  sheep;  if  she  sees 
the  dust  of  a  flock  arising  can  tuck  up  her 
skirts  and  away  to  the  edge  of  the  town,  getting 
back  as  much  news  of  where  they  go,  whence 
they  come,  and  the  conditions  of  the  weather 
as  Chabot  could  have  brought  himself,  and  not 
even  her  husband  knows  the  extent  of  her 
devices  for  keeping  him  surrounded  with  the 
sense  and  stir  of  life.  For  it  was  not  long  after 
his  marriage  that  Chabot  made  the  discovery 
that  all  the  quick  desire  of  him  toward  lovely 
women  warms  in  his  wife's  spirit  toward  the 
maimed  and  twisted  thing  that  he  is,  and 
thwarted  of  the  subtle  play  of  lip  and  limb  and 
eye,  spends  itself  in  offices  of  homely  comfort. 

And  this  is  the  bitterness  of  women 
177 


LOST   BORDERS 

which  has  come  to  him:  that  it  matters 
not  so  much  that  they  should  have  pas 
sion  as  the  power  to  provoke  it,  and  lack 
ing  the  spark  of  a  glance,  the  turn  of  an  ankle, 
the  treasures  of  tenderness  in  them  wither  un 
fulfilled.  Shut  behind  his  wife's  fat,  common 
place  exterior  lies  the  pulse  of  music,  the  delight 
of  motion,  the  swimming  sense,  the  quick, 
white  burning  fenced  within  his  scars.  Times 
like  this  he  remembers  what  has  passed  between 
him  and  many  women,  and  finds  his  com 
placency  sicken  and  die  in  him.  Knowing 
what  he  does  of  the  state  of  her  heart,  and  not 
being  quite  a  cad,  he  does  not  make  her  an 
altogether  bad  husband,  and  if  sometimes,  look 
ing  at  her  with  abhorring  eyes — the  shaking 
bosom,  the  arms  enormous,  the  shade  of  her 
upper  lip  no  longer  to  be  mistaken  for  a  smudge 
— resenting  her  lack  of  power  to  move  him,  he 
gives  her  a  bad  quarter  of  an  hour,  even  there 
she  has  the  best  of  him.  For  however  un 
happy  he  makes  her,  with  one  kiss  of  his  crooked 
mouth  he  can  set  it  all  right  again.  But  for 
Louis,  the  lift,  the  exultation,  the  exquisite, 
unmatched  wonder  of  the  world  will  not  hap 
pen  any  more ;  never  any  more. 


XIII 

THE   HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

IT  began  to  be  called  the  House  when  it  was 
the  only  frame  building  in  the  camp,  and 
wore  its  offence  upon  its  front — long  and  low, 
little  rooms,  each  with  its  own  door  opening 
upon  the  shallow  veranda.  Such  a  house  in 
a  mining  country  is  the  dial  finger  of  prosperity. 
All  the  ores  thereabout  were  argent,  and  as  the 
lords  of  far  market-places  made  silver  to  go 
up  a  few  points,  you  were  aware  of  it  in  the 
silken  rustle  and  the  heel-click  of  satin  slippers 
in  the  House.  When  the  Jews  got  their  heads 
together  and  whispered  in  the  Bourse,  the  gay 
skirts  would  flit  and  the  lights  go  out  in  the 
little  rooms  behind  the  two  cottonwood-trees 
that  should  have  screened  their  entrances,  but 
clacking  their  leaves  as  if  forever  fluttered  and 
aghast  at  what  went  on  in  them,  betrayed  it 
all  the  more. 

13  179 


LOST    BORDERS 

Inmates  came  and  went;  sometimes  they 
had  names  and  personalities,  but  mostly  they 
were  simply  the  women  of  the  House.  It  was 
always  spoken  of  in  that  way,  as  if  but  to  pass 
the  door-sill  were  to  be  seized  of  its  full  in 
heritance  of  turbulence  and  shame ;  and  as  the 
town  poised  and  hung  upon  the  turn  of  the 
appointed  fortune  of  mining-camps,  the  House 
passed  from  being  an  outburst,  an  excess,  to  a 
backwater  pool  of  enticement,  wherein  men 
swam  or  sunk  themselves,  and  at  last,  as  the 
quality  of  its  attractions  fell  off  with  the  grade 
of  ores,  it  became  merely  the  overt  sign  of  an 
admitted  and  ineradicable  baseness. 

Always  it  served  to  keep  alive  in  the  camp 
the  consciousness  of  style  and  the  allurement 
of  finery;  for  when  the  House  was  at  its  best, 
the  conditions  in  desert  camps,  the  price 
freight  was,  scrub-water  to  be  bought  by  the 
gallon,  the  prohibitive  cost  of  service,  ground 
terribly  the  faces  of  good  women.  But  they 
could  always  tell  what  kind  of  sleeves  were 
being  worn  in  San  Francisco  by  watching  the 
House.  They  all  watched  it;  women  whose 
lean  breasts  sagged  from  the  lips  of  many 
children,  virtuous  slattern  in  calico,  petted 
wives  secure  in  a  traditional  honor;  and  their 

1 80 


THE   HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

comment  kept  a  stir  about  it  like  the  pattering 
trail  of  the  wind  in  the  cottonwoods.  In  time, 
as  the  springs  of  mining  interest  drew  away 
from  that  district  to  flash  and  rise  again  in 
some  unguessed  other  side  of  the  world,  even 
that  fell  off  before  the  dead  weight  of  stable 
interests  and  a  respectability  too  stale  to  be 
curious ;  the  ground  about  it  was  parcelled  off ; 
all  the  accustomed  activities  of  small  towns 
went  on  around  it  screened  from  its  contamina 
tion  by  no  more  than  a  high  board  fence,  from 
which  in  time  the  palings  rotted  away.  Good 
women  exercised  themselves  no  more  against 
it  than  to  prevent  their  children  from  playing 
under  the  shade  of  the  two  cottonwoods  that 
broadened  before  it,  like  the  shadow  of  pro 
fessional  impropriety,  behind  which  the  House 
had  shrunk,  and,  in  its  condition  of  unregarded 
sordidness,  pointed  the  last  turn  of  the  dial. 

About  this  time  it  came  into  the  sole  pos 
session  of  Hard  Mag,  who  was  handsome 
enough  to  have  done  much  better  by  herself, 
and  concerning  whom  nothing  worth  recording 
might  have  transpired  had  it  not  been  for  Mrs. 
Henby. 

The  Henbys  had  taken  the  place  which  faced 
the  adjacent  street  and  abutted  on  the   back 
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LOST    BORDERS 

yard  of  the  House.  Henby  was  blast  foreman 
at  the  Eclipse,  and  came  home  every  other 
Sunday;  and  his  wife,  who  was  very  fond  of 
him,  found  a  consolation  for  the  lack  of  his 
company  in  the  ordered  life  of  the  town.  To 
wash  on  Monday,  iron  on  Tuesday,  bake  on 
Wednesday,  and  keep  the  front  room  always 
looking  as  if  nobody  lived  in  it,  gave  Mrs. 
Henby  a  virtuous  sense  of  well-being  that  she 
had  not  known  in  twenty  years  of  scrambled 
existence  at  the  mines.  The  trouble  with  Mrs. 
Henby  was  that  she  had  no  children.  If  there 
had  been  small  footsteps  going  about  the 
rooms  and  small  finger-clutchings  at  her  dress 
she  would  have  been  perfectly  happy,  and  con 
sequently  had  no  time  to  trouble  about  the 
doing  of  the  House.  There  had  been  hopes— 
but  at  forty,  though  her  cheeks  were  smooth 
and  bright,  her  hair  still  black,  and  her  figure 
looking  as  if  it  had  been  melted  and  poured 
into  her  neat  print  wrapper,  Mrs.  Henby  did 
not  hope  any  more.  She  made  a  silk  crazy- 
quilt  for  the  bed-lounge  in  the  parlor,  and  be 
gan  to  take  an  interest  in  Hard  Mag  and  the 
draggled  birds  of  passage  that  preened  them 
selves  occasionally  in  the  dismantled  rooms  of 
the  House,  though  being  the  most  virtuous  of 
182 


THE   HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

women  she  would  never  have  admitted  the 
faintest  distraction  in  the  affairs  of  "such  like." 
It  began  by  Mrs.  Henby  discovering,  through 
the  cracks  of  the  fence,  that  Mag,  in  the  inter 
vals  of  sinning,  was  largely  occupied  with  the 
tasks  of  widowed  and  neglected  women.  Mrs. 
Henby  cut  kindlings  for  herself  sometimes  if 
Henby  was  detained  at  the  mine  beyond  his 
week-end  visits,  but  to  see  Mag  of  the  hard, 
red  lips,  the  bright,  unglinting  hair,  and  the 
burnt-out  blackness  of  her  eyes  under  the  pale, 
long  lids,  so  employed  made  it  of  an  amazing 
opprobriousness.  For,  as  Mrs.  Henby  under 
stood  it,  the  root  of  sin  lay  in  self-indulgence, 
and  might  be  fostered  by  such  small  matters  as 
sitting  too  much  in  rocking-chairs  and  wearing 
too  becoming  hats;  she  saw  it  now  as  the  sign 
of  an  essential  incompetency  in  the  offices  of 
creditable  living.  Mag,  she  perceived,  did  not 
even  know  how  to  pin  up  her  skirts  properly 
when  she  swept  the  back  stoop.  To  see  her 
thus  fumbling  at  the  mechanism  of  existence 
was  to  put  her  forever  beyond  the  reach  of  re 
sentment  into  the  region  of  pitiable  humanness. 
In  time  it  grew  upon  Mrs.  Henby  that  the  poor 
creatures,  who  took  the  air  of  late  afternoons 
in  the  yard  behind  the  House,  might  have  pos- 
183 


LOST    BORDERS 

sibilities  even  of  being  interested  in  the  crazy- 
quilt  and  the  garden,  and  being  prevented  by 
some  mysterious  law  of  their  profession  from 
doing  so.  She  went  so  far  upon  this  supposi 
tion  as  to  offer  Mag  a  bunch  of  radishes  out  of 
her  minute  vegetable  plot,  which  Mag,  to  her 
relief,  refused.  Mrs.  Henby  could  no  more  re 
frain  from  neighborliness  than  she  could  help 
being  large  at  the  waist,  but  she  really  would 
not  like  to  be  seen  handing  things  through  the  -> 
fence  to  the  inmates  of  the  House.  She  came 
to  that  in  time,  though. 

Some  wretched  consort  of  Mag's  fell  sick  at 
the  House  of  the  lead  poisoning  common  in  the 
mines  when  the  doctor  was  away  at  Maverick, 
and  nobody  in  the  neighborhood  so  skilled  in 
the  remedies  proper  to  the  occasion  as  Mrs. 
Henby.  This  led  to  several  conferences,  and 
the  passage  between  the  palings  of  sundry 
preparations  of  hot  milk  and  soups  and  cus 
tards.  Mrs.  Henby  would  hand  them  out  after 
nightfall,  and  find  the  dishes  on  her  side  of  the 
fence  in  the  morning.  She  was  so  ashamed  of 
it  that  she  never  told  even  her  husband,  and 
the  man  having  gone  away  to  his  own  place 
and  died  there,  Mag  had  nobody  to  tell  it  to 
in  any  case.  But  Mrs.  Henby  always  enter- 
184 


THE    HOUSE  OF   OFFENCE 

tained  a  subconscious  sureness  that  something 
unpleasant  was  likely  to  come  of  her  condon- 
ings  of  inquity,  and  one  morning,  when  she 
came  out  of  the  kitchen  door  to  find  Mag  fur 
tively  waiting  at  the  fence,  she  roughed  for 
ward  all  the  quills  of  her  respectability  at  once. 
Mag  leaned  her  breast  upon  the  point  of  a 
broken  paling,  as  though  the  sharpness  of  it 
stayed  her.  She  had  no  right  to  the  desultory 
courtesies  of  back- fence  neighborliness,  and  did 
not  attempt  them. 

"I've  had  a  letter,"  she  said,  abruptly,  show 
ing  it  clinched  against  her  side;  the  knuckles 
of  her  hand  were  strained  and  white. 

"A  letter?" 

"From  Kansas.  My  daughter's  coming." 
She  lowered  her  voice  and  looked  back  cautious 
ly  at  the  shut  House,  as  if  the  thing  could  over 
hear. 

So  she  had  a  daughter — this  painted  piece; 
and  God-fearing  women  might  long  and  long! 
Twenty  years'  resentment  began  to  burn  in 
Mrs.  Henby's  cushiony  bosom. 

"What  are  you  doin'  with  a  daughter?"  she 
said. 

"Oh,"  cried  Mag,  impatiently,  "I  had  her 
years  ago — ten — eleven  years!  She  has  been 

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LOST   BORDERS 

living  with  my  aunt  in  Kansas:  and  now  my 
aunt  is  dead,  and  they  are  sending  her." 

"Who  is  sending  her?" 

"I  don't  know — the  neighbors.  I've  nobody 
belonging  to  me  back  there.  They  have  to  do 
something  with  her,  so  they  are  sending  her  to 
me.  Here!"  She  struck  upon  the  paling 
wickedly  with  her  hand. 

"Where's  her  father?"  Mrs.  Henby's  inter 
est  rose  superior  to  her  resentment. 

"How  should  I  know?  I  tell  you  it  was  a 
long  time  ago.  I  came  away  when  she  was  a 
little,  little  baby.  My  aunt  was  religious  and 
couldn't  have  anything  to  do  with  me,  but  she 
took  care  of — her!  I  sent  money." 

Mrs.  Henby  recalled  herself  to  the  aloofness 
of  entire  respectability.  ' '  If  your  aunt  wouldn't 
have  you,  I  don't  see  how  she  could  feel  to 
abide  your  money?" 

"I  told  her  I  was  married,"  said  Mag,  "and 
respectable."  She  leaned  upon  the  paling  and 
laughed  a  hard,  sharp  laugh. 

Mrs.  Henby  gathered  up  her  apron  full  of 
kindlings. 

"Well,  you've  made  your  bed,"  she  said. 
"I  guess  you  will  lie  in  it." 

But  she  sat  down  trembling  as  soon  as  she 
1 86 


WELL.   YOUVE     MADE     YOUR     BED.       I     GUESS     YOU     WILL 
LIE     IN     IT" 


THE   HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

had  shut  the  door.  A  daughter — to  that  wom 
an — and  she —  Mrs.  Henby  went  about  shak 
ing  her  head  and  talking  to  herself  with  in 
dignation.  All  day  the  House  remained  shut 
and  slumbering,  its  patched  and  unwashed 
windows  staring  blankly  on  the  yard;  but  if 
ever  Mrs.  Henby  came  out  of  her  kitchen  door, 
as  if  she  were  the  cuckoo  on  the  striking  of  the 
hour,  Mag  appeared  from  the  House.  It  was 
evident  she  had  ordered  a  clear  field  for  her 
self,  for  no  one  came  out  in  draggled  finery  to 
take  the  air  that  day.  It  was  dusk  before  Mrs. 
Henby's  humanness  got  the  better  of  her.  She 
went  out  to  the  woodpile  and  whispered  to  the 
stirring  of  Mag's  dress: 

"When's  she  coming?" 

'*  Wednesday.  She  will  be  started  before  I 
can  get  a  letter  to  her." 

"Well,  I  reckon  you'll  have  to  take  her," 
said  Mrs.  Henby,  unconsolingly.  A  flash  of 
Mag's  insuperable  hardness  broke  from  her. 

11  She'll  spoil  trade,"  she  said. 

Mrs.  Henby  looked  up  the  dusky  bulk  of  the 
House  beyond  her,  lines  of  light  at  the  win 
dows  like  the  red  lids  of  distempered  eyes. 
All  at  once,  and,  as  she  said  afterward,  with 
out  for  the  moment  any  consciousness  relativity, 

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LOST   BORDERS 

she  recalled  the  quagmires  of  unwarned  water- 
holes  where  cattle  sink  and  flounder,  and  the 
choking  call  of  warning  that  sounds  to  the  last 
above  the  stifling  slime.  When  Mag  said  that 
about  the  child  and  her  way  of  making  a  liv 
ing,  Mrs.  Henby  jumped.  She  thought  she 
heard  the  smothering  suck  of  the  mire.  Some 
body  in  the  House  laughed  and  cried  out 
coarsely,  and  then  she  heard  Mag's  voice  going 
on  hurriedly  behind  the  palings: 

"Mrs.  Henby!  Mrs.  Henby!  you've  got  to 
help  me —  I  must  find  some  place  for  her  to 
board —  She  has  been  well  brought  up,  I  tell 
you.  My  aunt  is  religious—  She  would  be 
a  comfort  to  some  good  person." 

"Meaning  me,  I  suppose,"  sniffed  Mrs. 
Henby.  Mag  had  not  meant  anybody  in  par 
ticular,  but  she  swept  it  up  urgently. 

"Oh,  if  you  would — she'd  be  a  comfort  to 
you!  She's  real  sweet-looking — they  sent  me 
her  picture  once."  She  felt  for  phrases  to 
touch  the  other  woman,  but  they  rang  in 
sincerely.  "You'd  be  the  saving  of  her — if 
you  would." 

"Well,  I  won't!"  snapped  Mrs.  Henby;  and 
as  soon  as  she  was  inside  she  locked  the  door 
against  even  the  suggestion.  "Me  to  take 
1 88 


THE   HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

anything  off  that  painted  piece!"  she  quivered, 
angrily. 

It  was  five  days  until  Wednesday,  and  Mag 
struck  to  her  trail  insistently. 

"You  been  thinking  of  what  I  said  last 
night?"  she  questioned  in  the  morning  interval 
at  the  woodpile. 

Mrs.  Henby  denied  it,  but  she  had.  She 
had  thought  of  what  Henby  would  say  to  it, 
and  wondered  if  Mag's  daughter  had  hard 
eyes,  and  bright,  unglinting,  canary-colored 
hair.  She  thought  of  what  explanation  she 
might  make  to  the  neighbors  in  case  she  de 
cided  suddenly  to  adopt  the  daughter  of — of 
an  old  friend  in  Kansas;  then  she  thought  of 
the  faces  of  the  women  who  wrent  in  and  out 
of  the  House,  and  resolved  not  to  think  any 
more. 

She  kept  away  from  the  woodpile  as  much 
as  possible  during  Saturday  and  Sunday,  but 
Monday  evening  she  heard  Mag  calling  her  from 
the  back  of  the  yard.  This  was  the  worst  yet, 
for  there  was  no  telling  who  might  overhear. 

"Mrs.  Henby,"  demanded  the  painted  piece, 
"are  you  going  to  see  that  innocent  child 
brought  to  this  place  and  never  lift  a  hand 
to  it?" 

189 


LOST    BORDERS 

"I  don't  know  as  I  got  any  call  to  interfere," 
said  Mrs.  Henby. 

"And  you  with  a  good  home,  and  calling 
yourself  Christian,  and  all,"  went  on  the  hard 
one.  "Besides,  I'd  pay  you." 

"I  don't  feel  to  need  any  of  your  money," 
thrust  in  Mrs.  Henby,  resentfully.  "I  guess  I 
could  take  care  of  one  child  without — but  I 
ain't  going  to."  She  broke  off,  and  moved 
rapidly  toward  the  house. 

"Mrs.  Henby,  listen  to  me!"  cried  Mag,  shak 
ing  at  the  palings  as  though  they  had  been  the 
bars  of  a  cage  and  she  trapped  in  it.  "For 
God's  sake,  Mrs.  Henby,  you  must!  Mrs. 
Henby,  if  you  won't  listen  to  me  here,  I  shall 
come  to  your  house." 

Mrs.  Henby  heard  the  crack  of  the  rotten 
palings  as  she  shut  the  door. 

"Mrs.  Henby!  Mrs.  Henby!"  threatened  the 
voice,  "I'm  coming  in!" 

Then  the  crash  of  splintering  wood,  and 
Mag's  hand  on  the  knob.  The  vehemence  of 
her  mood,  her  tragic  movements,  the  bright 
vividness  of  her  lips  and  hair  seemed  to  force 
Mrs.  Henby  into  the  attitude  of  the  offender. 
She  sat  limply  in  a  chair  twisting  her  hands  in 
her  fat  lap  while  the  other  assailed  her.  Be- 
190 


THE    HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

hind  her  on  the  wall  Mag's  shadow  shook  and 
threatened  like  the  shape  of  an  uncouth 
destiny. 

"I  know  what  you  are  thinking,  Mrs.  Henby. 
You  think  there's  bad  blood,  and  she  will  turn 
out  like  me  maybe,  but  I  tell  you  it's  no  such 
thing.  Look  here — if  it's  any  satisfaction  to 
you  to  know — I  was  good  when  I  had  her,  and 
her  father  was  good — only  we  were  young  and 
didn't  know  any  better — we  hadn't  any  feelings 
except  what  we'd  have  had  if  we  had  been 
married — only  we  didn't  happen  to —  It's  the 
truth,  Mrs.  Henby,  if  I  die  for  it.  Bad  blood!" 
she  said,  hardness  augmenting  upon  her.  "How 
many  a  man  comes  to  the  House  and  goes 
away  to  raise  a  family,  and  not  a  word  said  about 
bad  blood!  You  don't  reckon — " 

But  Mrs.  Henby  had  her  apron  over  her  face, 
and  was  crying  into  it.  Mag  floundered  back 
to  the  other  woman's  point  of  view. 

"  If  it  is  a  question  what  she'll  come  to,  you 
know  well  enough  if  I  have  to  take  her  with 
me.  Me!"  she  said.  She  threw  round  herself 
an  indescribable  air  of  lascivious  deviltry,  as 
though  she  had  been  blown  upon  by  the  blast 
of  an  unseen  furnace,  and  the  shadow  upon 
the  wall  shook  and  confirmed  it.  "That's  what 
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LOST   BORDERS 

she  will  come  to  unless  you  save  her  from  it. 
It's  up  to  you,  Mrs.  Henby." 

"I — I  don't  know  what  Henby  will  say," 
whimpered  Mrs.  Henby,  afresh.  — 

"Say?"  urged  Mag,  with  the  scorn  of  her 
kind  for  the  well-regulated  husband.  "He'll 
say  anything  he  thinks  you  want  him  to  say. 
He'll  be  as  fond  as  anything  of  her — and  you 
can  bring  her  up  to  be  a  comfort  to  him." 
The  poverty  of  Mag's  experience  furnished  her 
with  no  phrases  to  express  what  a  child  might 
become. 

"A  nice  time  I'd  have,"  burst  out  the  other 
woman,  in  a  last  throb  of  resentment,  "bring 
ing  her  up  to  be  a  comfort  to  anybody,  with 
her  own  mother  living  a  sinful  life  right  under 
her  eyes." 

"Oh,"  said  Mag,  with  enlightenment,  "so 
that's  what  is  troubling  you!  Well — if  you 
say  the  word — I'll  clear  out.  The  girls  will 
kick — but  they  have  to  do  what  I  say.  Look 
here,  then!  If  you'll  take  the  kid— I'll  go." 

"And  never  come  back — nor  let  her  know?" 

"Cross  my  heart  to  die,"  said  Mag. 

"Well,  then  "—Mrs.  Henby  let  her  apron  fall 
tremulously— "I'll  take  her." 

"For  keeps?" 

IQ2 


THE    HOUSE   OF   OFFENCE 

"For  keeps,"  vowed  Mrs.  Henby,  solemnly. 

They  were  silent,  regarding  each  other  for 
a  time,  neither  knowing  how  to  terminate  the 
interview  without  offence. 

"What's  her  name?"  asked  Mrs.  Henby, 
timidly,  at  last. 

"Marietta." 

Mag  searched  her  scant  remembrances  and 
brought  up  this:  "She's  got  dark  hair." 

Mrs.  Henby  was  visibly  comforted. 

Mrs.  Henby  found,  after  all,  that  she  was  not 
put  to  any  great  strain  of  inventiveness  to 
account  for  the  little  girl  she  had  decided  to 
adopt,  the  event  being  overshadowed,  in  the 
estimation  of  the  townspeople,  by  the  more 
memorable  one  which  occurred  on  the  very 
night  of  Marietta's  arrival.  This  was  no  less 
than  the  departure  of  Hard  Mag  and  the 
women  of  the  House.  They  went  out  of  it  as 
they  came,  with  scant  warning,  helped  by 
coarse  laughter  of  the  creatures  they  had 
preyed  upon,  and  with  so  much  of  careless 
haste  that  about  two  hours  after  their  flitting — 
caught,  it  was  supposed,  from  their  neglected 
fires — the  whole  shell  of  the  House  burst  into 
flame.  It  made  a  red  flare  in  the  windows  in 


LOST    BORDERS 

the  middle  of  the  night,  but,  as  none  of  the 
townspeople  had  any  interest  in  it  and  no 
property  was  endangered,  it  was  allowed  to 
burn  quite  out,  which  it  did  as  quickly  as  the 
passions  it  had  thrived  upon,  to  an  inconsider 
able  heap  of  cinders.  The  next  year  the  Henbys 
took  over  the  place  where  it  had  stood  for  a 
garden,  and  Henby  made  a  swing  under  the 
cottonwood-trees  for  his  adopted  daughter. 


XIV 
THE    WALKING   WOMAN 

THE  first  time  of  my  hearing  of  her  was  at 
Temblor.  We  had  come  all  one  day  be 
tween  blunt,  whitish  bluffs  rising  from  mirage 
water,  with  a  thick,  pale  wake  of  dust  billowing 
from  the  wheels,  all  the  dead  wall  of  the  foot 
hills  sliding  and  shimmering  with  heat,  to  learn 
that  the  Walking  Woman  had  passed  us  some 
where  in  the  dizzying  dimness,  going  down  to 
the  Tulares  on  her  own  feet.  We  heard  of  her 
again  in  the  Carrisal,  and  again  at  Adobe  Sta 
tion,  where  she  had  passed  a  week  before  the 
shearing,  and  at  last  I  had  a  glimpse  of  her 
at  the  Eighteen-Mile  House  as  I  went  hurriedly 
northward  on  the  Mojave  stage ;  and  afterward 
sheepherders  at  whose  camps  she  slept,  and 
cowboys  at  rodeos,  told  me  as  much  of  her  way 
of  life  as  they  could  understand.  Like  enough 
they  told  her  as  much  of  mine.  That  was  very 


LOST    BORDERS 

little.  She  was  the  Walking  Woman,  and  no 
one  knew  her  name,  but  because  she  was  a  sort 
of  whom  men  speak  respectfully,  they  called 
her  to  her  face  Mrs.  Walker,  and  she  answered 
to  it  if  she  was  so  inclined.  She  came  and 
went  about  our  western  world  on  no  discover 
able  errand,  and  whether  she  had  some  place 
of  refuge  where  she  lay  by  in  the  interim,  or 
whether  between  her  seldom,  unaccountable 
appearances  in  our  quarter  she  went  on  steadily 
walking,  wa  never  learned.  She  came  and 
went,  oftenest  in  a  kind  of  muse  of  travel  which 
the  untrammelled  space  begets,  or  at  rare  inter 
vals  flooding  wondrously  with  talk,  never  of 
herself,  but  of  things  she  had  known  and  seen. 
She  must  have  seen  some  rare  happenings,  too 
—by  report.  She  was  at  Maverick  the  time  of 
the  Big  Snow,  and  at  Tres  Pinos  when  they 
brought  home  the  body  of  Morena ;  and  if  any 
body  could  have  told  whether  De  Borba  killed 
Mariana  for  spite  or  defence,  it  would  have  been 
she,  only  she  could  not  be  found  when  most 
wanted.  She  was  at  Tunawai  at  the  time  of 
the  cloud-burst,  and  if  she  had  cared  for  it 
could  have  known  most  desirable  things  of  the 
ways  of  trail-making,  burrow-habiting  small 
things. 

196 


THE   WALKING   WOMAN 

All  of  which  should  have  made  her  worth 
meeting,  though  it  was  not,  in  fact,  for  such 
things  I  was  wishful  to  meet  her;  and  as  it 
turned  out,  it  was  not  of  these  things  we  talked 
when  at  last  we  came  together.  For  one  thing, 
she  was  a  wo  an,  not  old,  who  had  gone  about 
alone  in  a  country  where  the  number  of  women 
is  as  one  in  fifteen.  She  had  eaten  and  slept 
at  the  herder's  camps,  and  laid  by  for  days  at 
one-man  stations  whose  masters  had  no  other 
touch  of  human  kind  than  the  passing  of  chance 
prospectors,  or  the  halting  of  the  tri-weekly 
stage.  She  had  been  set  on  her  way  by  team 
sters  who  lifted  her  out  of  white,  hot  desertness 
and  put  her  down  at  the  crossing  of  unnamed 
ways,  days  distant  from  anywhere.  And 
through  all  this  she  passed  unarmed  and  un- 
offended.  I  had  the  best  testimony  to  this, 
the  witness  of  the  men  themselves.  I  think 
they  talked  of  it  because  they  were  so  much 
surprised  at  it.  It  was  not,  on  the  whole,  what 
they  expected  of  themselves. 

Well  I  understand  that  nature  which  wastes 
its  borders  with  too  eager  burning,  beyond 
which  rim  of  desolation  it  flares  forever  quick 
and  white,  and  have  had  some  inkling  of  the 
isolating  calm  of  a  desire  too  high  to  stoop  to 
197 


LOST    BORDERS 

satisfaction.  But  you  could  not  think  of  these 
things  pertaining  to  the  Walking  Woman ;  and 
if  there  were  ever  any  truth  in  the  exemption 
from  offence  residing  in  a  frame  of  behavior 
called  ladylike,  it  should  have  been  inoperative 
here.  What  this  really  means  is  that  you  get 
no  affront  so  long  as  your  behavior  in  the  esti 
mate  of  the  particular  audience  invites  none. 
In  the  estimate  of  the  immediate  audience — 
conduct  which  affords  protection  in  Mayfair 
gets  you  no  consideration  in  Maverick.  And 
by  no  canon  could  it  be  considered  ladylike  to 
go  about  on  your  own  feet,  with  a  blanket  and 
a  black  bag  and  almost  no  money  in  your 
purse,  in  and  about  the  haunts  of  rude  and 
solitary  men. 

There  were  other  things  that  pointed  the  wish 
for  a  personal  encounter  with  the  Walking 
Woman.  One  of  them  was  the  contradiction  of 
reports  of  her — as  to  whether  she  was  comely,  for 
example.  Report  said  yes,  and  again,  plain  to 
the  point  of  deformity.  She  had  a  twist  to  her 
face,  some  said;  a  hitch  to  one  shoulder;  they 
averred  she  limped  as  she  walked.  But  by  the 
distance  she  covered  she  should  have  been 
straight  and  young.  As  to  sanity,  equal  in 
certitude.  On  the  mere  evidence  of  her  way  of 
198 


THE    WALKING    WOMAN 

life  she  was  cracked;  not  quite  broken,  but  un 
serviceable.  Yet  in  her  talk  there  was  both 
wisdom  and  information,  and  the  word  she 
brought  about  trails  and  water-holes  was  as 
reliable  as  an  Indian's. 

By  her  own  account  she  had  begun  by  walk 
ing  off  an  illness.  There  had  been  an  invalid 
to  be  taken  care  of  for  years,  leaving  her  at 
last  broken  in  body,  and  with  no  recourse  but 
her  own  feet  to  carry  her  out  of  that  predica 
ment.  It  seemed  there  had  been,  besides  the 
death  of  her  invalid,  some  other  worrying 
affairs,  upon  which,  and  the  nature  of  her  ill 
ness,  she  was  never  quite  clear,  so  that  it  might 
very  well  have  been  an  unsoundness  of  mind 
which  drove  her  to  the  open,  sobered  and  healed 
at  last  by  the  large  soundness  of  nature.  It 
must  have  been  about  that  time  that  she  lost 
her  name.  I  am  convinced  that  she  never  told 
it  because  she  did  not  know  it  herself.  She 
was  the  Walking  Woman,  and  the  country  peo 
ple  called  her  Mrs.  Walker.  At  the  time  I 
knew  her,  though  she  wore  short  hair  and  a 
man's  boots,  and  had  a  fine  down  over  all  her 
face  from  exposure  to  the  weather,  she  was  per 
fectly  sweet  and  sane. 

I  had  met  her  occasionally  at  ranch-houses 
199 


LOST    BORDERS 

and  road-stations,  and  had  got  as  much  ac 
quaintance  as  the  place  allowed;  but  for  the 
things  I  wished  to  know  there  wanted  a  time 
of  leisure  and  isolation.  And  when  the  occasion 
came  we  talked  altogether  of  other  things. 

It  was  at  Warm  Spring  in  the  Little  Ante 
lope  I  came  upon  her  in  the  heart  of  a  clear 
forenoon.  ( The  spring  lies  off  a  mile  from  the 
main  trail,  and  has  the  only  trees  about  it 
known  in  that  country.  First  you  come  upon 
a  pool  of  waste  full  of  weeds  of  a  poisonous  dark 
green,  every  reed  ringed  about  the  water-level 
with  a  muddy  white  incrustation.  Then  the 
three  oaks  appear  staggering  on  the  slope,  and 
the  spring  sobs  and  blubbers  below  them  in 
ashy-colored  mud.  All  the  hills  of  that  country 
have  the  down  plunge  toward  the  desert  and 
back  abruptly  toward  the  Sierra.  The  grass  is 
thick  and  brittle  and  bleached  straw-color  tow 
ard  the  end  of  the  season.  \  As  I  rode  up  the 
swale  of  the  spring  I  saw  the  Walking  Woman 
sitting  where  the  grass  was  deepest,  with  her 
black  bag  and  blanket,  which  she  carried  on  a 
stick,  beside  her.  It  was  one  of  those  days 
when  the  genius  of  talk  flows  as  smoothly  as 
the  rivers  of  mirage  through  the  blue  hot  desert 
morning. 

200 


THE   WALKING   WOMAN 

You  are  not  to  suppose  that  in  my  report  of  a 
Borderer  I  give  you  the  words  only,  but  the 
full  meaning  of  the  speech.  Very  often  the 
words  are  merely  the  punctuation  of  thought; 
rather,  the  crests  of  the  long  waves  of  inter- 
communicative  silences.  Yet  the  speech  of  the 
Walking  Woman  was  fuller  than  most. 

The  best  of  our  talk  that  day  began  in  some 
dropped  word  of  hers  from  which  I  inferred 
that  she  had  had  a  child.  I  was  surprised  at 
that,  and  then  wondered  why  I  should  have 
been  surprised,  for  it  is  the  most  natural  of  all 
experiences  to  have  children.  I  said  something 
of  that  purport,  and  also  that  it  was  one  of 
the  perquisites  of  living  I  should  be  least  willing 
to  do  without.  And  that  led  to  the  Walking 
Woman  saying  that  there  were  three  things 
which  if  you  had  known  you  could  cut  out  all 
the  rest,  and  they  were  good  any  way  you  got 
them,  but  best  if,  as  in  her  case,  they  were 
related  to  and  grew  each  one  out  of  the  others. 
It  was  while  she  talked  that  I  decided  that  she 
really  did  have  a  twist  to  her  face,  a  sort  of 
natural  warp  or  skew  into  which  it  fell  when 
it  was  worn  merely  as  a  countenance,  but  which 
disappeared  the  moment  it  became  the  vehicle 
of  thought  or  feeling. 

201 


LOST    BORDERS 

The  first  of  the  experiences  the  Walking 
Woman  had  found  most  worth  while  had  come 
to  her  in  a  sand-storm  on  the  south  slope  of 
Tehachapi  in  a  dateless  spring.  I  judged  it 
should  have  been  about  the  time  she  began  to 
find  herself,  after  the  period  of  worry  and  loss 
in  which  her  wandering  began.  She  had  come, 
in  a  day  pricked  full  of  intimations  of  a  storm, 
to  the  camp  of  Filon  Geraud,  whose  companion 
shepherd  had  gone  a  three  days'  pas  ear  to 
Mojave  for  supplies.  Geraud  was  of  great  hardi 
hood,  red-blooded,  of  a  full  laughing  eye,  and 
an  indubitable  spark  for  women.  It  was  the 
season  of  the  year  when  there  is  a  soft  bloom 
on  the  days,  but  the  nights  are  cowering  cold 
and  the  lambs  tender,  not  yet  flockwise.  At 
such  times  a  sand-storm  works  incalculable 
disaster.  The  lift  of  the  wind  is  so  great  that 
the  whole  surface  of  the  ground  appears  to 
travel  upon  it  slantwise,  thinning  out  miles 
high  in  air.  In  the  intolerable  smother  the 
lambs  are  lost  from  the  ewes ;  neither  dogs  nor 
man  make  headway  against  it. 

The  morning  flared  through  a  horizon  of  yel 
low  smudge,  and  by  mid-forenoon  the  flock 
broke. 

"There  were  but  the  two  of  us  to  deal  with 

202 


THE   WALKING   WOMAN 

the  trouble,"  said  the  Walking  Woman.  " Until 
that  time  I  had  not  known  how  strong  I  was, 
nor  how  good  it  is  to  run  when  running  is  worth 
while.  The  flock  travelled  down  the  wind,  the 
sand  bit  our  faces;  we  called,  and  after  a  time 
heard  the  words  broken  and  beaten  small  by 
the  wind.  But  after  a  little  we  had  not  to  call. 
All  the  time  of  our  running  in  the  yellow  dusk 
of  day  and  the  black  dark  of  night,  I  knew 
where  Filon  was.  A  flock-length  away,  I  knew 
him.  Feel?  What  should  I  feel?  I  knew. 
I  ran  with  the  flock  and  turned  it  this  way  and 
that  as  Filon  would  have. 

"Such  was  the  force  of  the  wind  that  when 
we  came  together  we  held  by  one  another  and 
talked  a  little  between  pantings.  We  snatched 
and  ate  what  we  could  as  we  ran.  All  that  day 
and  night  until  the  next  afternoon  the  camp 
kit  was  not  out  of  the  cayaques.  But  we  held 
the  flock.  We  herded  them  under  a  butte 
when  the  wind  fell  off  a  little,  and  the  lambs 
sucked;  when  the  storm  rose  they  broke,  but 
we  kept  upon  their  track  and  brought  them 
together  again.  At  night  the  wind  quieted, 
and  we  slept  by  turns;  at  least  Filon  slept.  I 
lay  on  the  ground  when  my  turn  was  and 
beat  with  the  storm.  I  was  no  more  tired  than 
203 


LOST   BORDERS 

the  earth  was.  The  sand  filled  in  the  creases 
of  the  blanket,  and  where  I  turned,  dripped 
back  upon  the  ground.  But  we  saved  the 
sheep.  Some  ewes  there  were  that  would  not 
give  down  their  milk  because  of  the  worry  of 
the  storm,  and  the  lambs  died.  But  we  kept 
the  flock  together.  And  I  was  not  tired/' 

The  Walking  Woman  stretched  out  her  arms 
and  clasped  herself,  rocking  in  them  as  if  she 
would  have  hugged  the  recollection  to  her 
breast. 

"For  you  see,"  said  she,  "I  worked  with  a 
man,  without  excusing,  without  any  burden 
on  me  of  looking  or  seeming.  Not  fiddling  or 
fumbling  as  women  work,  and  hoping  it  will 
all  turn  out  for  the  best.  It  was  not  for  Filon 
to  ask,  Can  you,  or  Will  you.  He  said,  Do,  and 
I  did.  And  my  work  was  good.  We  held  the 
flock.  And  that,"  said  the  Walking  Woman, 
the  twist  coming  in  her  face  again,  "is  one  of 
the  things  that  make  you  able  to  do  without 
the  others." 

"Yes,"  I  said;  and  then,  "What  others?" 

"Oh,"  she  said,  as  if  it  pricked  her,  "the 
looking  and  the  seeming." 

And  I  had  not  thought  until  that  time  that 
one  who  had  the  courage  to  be  the  Walking 
204 


THE   WALKING   WOMAN 

Woman  would  have  cared!  We  sat  and  looked 
at  the  pattern  of  the  thick  crushed  grass  on  the 
slope,  wavering  in  the  fierce  noon  like  the  water 
ings  in  the  coat  of  a  tranquil  beast;  the  ache 
of  a  world-old  bitterness  sobbed  and  whispered 
in  the  spring.  At  last — 

"It  is  by  the  looking  and  the  seeming,"  said 
I,  "that  the  opportunity  finds  you  out." 

"Filon  found  out,"  said  the  Walking  Woman. 
She  smiled ;  and  went  on  from  that  to  tell  me 
how,  when  the  wind  went  down  about  four 
o'clock  and  left  the  afternoon  clear  and  tender, 
the  flock  began  to  feed,  and  they  had  out  the 
kit  from  the  cayaques,  and  cooked  a  meal. 
When  it  was  over,  and  Filon  had  his  pipe  be 
tween  his  teeth,  he  came  over  from  his  side  of 
the  fire,  of  his  own  notion,  and  stretched  him 
self  on  the  ground  beside  her.  Of  his  own 
notion.  There  was  that  in  the  way  she  said 
it  that  made  it  seem  as  if  nothing  of  the  sort 
had  happened  before  to  the  Walking  Woman, 
and  for  a  moment  I  thought  she  was  about  to 
tell  me  one  of  the  things  I  wished  to  know; 
but  she  went  on  to  say  what  Filon  had  said  to 
her  of  her  work  with  the  flock.  Obvious,  kind 
ly  things,  such  as  any  man  in  sheer  decency 
would  have  said,  so  that  there  must  have  some- 
205 


LOST   BORDERS 

thing  more  gone  with  the  words  to  make  them 
so  treasured  of  the  Walking  Woman. 

"We  were  very  comfortable,"  said  she,  "and 
not  so  tired  as  we  expected  to  be.  Filon  leaned 
up  on  his  elbow.  I  had  not  noticed  until  then 
how  broad  he  was  in  the  shoulders,  and  how 
strong  in  the  arms.  And  we  had  saved  the 
flock  together.  We  felt  that.  There  was  some 
thing  that  said  together,  in  the  slope  of  his 
shoulders  toward  me.  It  was  around  his 
mouth  and  on  the  cheek  high  up  under  the 
shine  of  his  eyes.  And  under  the  shine  the 
look — the  look  that  said,  'We  are  of  one  sort 
and  one  mind' — his  eyes  that  were  the  color 
of  the  flat  water  in  the  toulares — do  you  know 
the  look?" 

"I  know  it." 

"The  wind  was  stopped  and  all  the  earth 
smelled  of  dust,  and  Filon  understood  very 
well  that  what  I  had  done  with  him  I  could 
not  have  done  so  well  with  another.  And  the 
look — the  look  in  the  eyes — " 

"Ah-ah— !" 

I  have  always  said,  I  will  say  again,  I  do 

not  know  why  at  this  point  the  Walking  Woman 

touched  me.     If  it  were  merely  a  response  to 

my  unconscious  throb  of  sympathy,  or  the  un- 

206 


THE   WALKING   WOMAN 

premeditated  way  of  her  heart  to  declare  that 
this,  after  all,  was  the  best  of  all  indispensable 
experiences;  or  if  in  some  flash  of  forward 
vision,  encompassing  the  unimpassioned  years, 
the  stir,  the  movement  of  tenderness  were  for 
me— but  no ;  as  often  as  I  have  thought  of  it,  I 
have  thought  of  a  different  reason,  but  no  con 
clusive  one,  why  the  Walking  Woman  should 
have  put  out  her  hand  and  laid  it  on  my  arm. 

"To  work  together,  to  love  together,"  said 
the  Walking  Woman,  withdrawing  her  hand 
again;  "there  you  have  two  of  the  things; 
the  other  you  know." 

"The  mouth  at  the  breast,"  said  I. 

"The  lips  and  the  hands,"  said  the  Walking 
Woman.  "The  little,  pushing  hands  and  the 
small  cry."  There  ensued  a  pause  of  fullest 
understanding,  while  the  land  before  us  swam 
in  the  noon,  and  a  dove  in  the  oaks  behind  the 
spring  began  to  call.  A  little  red  fox  came 
out  of  the  hills  and  lapped  delicately  at  the 
pool. 

"I  stayed  with  Filon  until  the  fall,"  said  she. 
"All  that  summer  in  the  Sierras,  until  it  was 
time  to  turn  south  on  the  trail.  It  was  a  good 
time,  and  longer  than  he  could  be  expected  to 
have  loved  one  like  me.  And  besides,  I  wag 
207 


LOST    BORDERS 

no  longer  able  to  keep  the  trail.  My  baby  was 
born  in  October." 

Whatever  more  there  was  to  say  to  this,  the 
Walking  Woman's  hand  said  it,  straying  with 
remembering  gesture  to  her  breast.  There  are 
so  many  ways  of  loving  and  working,  but  only 
one  way  of  the  first-born.  She  added  after  an 
interval,  that  she  did  not  know  if  she  would 
have  given  up  her  walking  to  keep  at  home  and 
tend  him,  or  whether  the  thought  of  her  son's 
small  feet  running  beside  her  in  the  trails 
would  have  driven  her  to  the  open  again.  The 
baby  had  not  stayed  long  enough  for  that. 
"And  whenever  the  wind  blows  in  the  night," 
said  the  Walking  Woman,  "I  wake  and  wonder 
if  he  is  well  covered." 

She  took  up  her  black  bag  and  her  blanket; 
there  was  the  ranch-house  of  Dos  Palos  to  be 
made  before  night,  and  she  went  as  outliers 
do,  without  a  hope  expressed  of  another  meet 
ing  and  no  word  of  good-bye.  She  was  the 
Walking  Woman.  That  wras  it.  She  had 
walked  off  all  sense  of  society-made  values,  and, 
knowing  the  best  when  the  best  came  to  her, 
was  able  to  take  it.  Work — as  I  believed;  love 
—as  the  Walking  Woman  had  proved  it;  a 
child — as  you  subscribe  to  it.  But  look  you: 
208 


X 

THE   WALKING   WOMAN 

it  was  the  naked  thing  the  Walking  Woman 
grasped,  not  dressed  and  tricked  out,  for  in 
stance,  by  prejudices  in  favor  of  certain  occupa 
tions";  and  love,  man  love,  taken  as  it  came, 
not  picked  over  and  rejected  if  it  carried  no 
obligation  of  permanency;  and  a  child;  any 
way  you  get  it,  a  child  is  good  to  have,  say 
nature  and  the  Walking  Woman;  to  have  it 
and  not  to  wait  upon  a  proper  concurrence  of 
so  many  decorations  that  the  event  may  not 
come  at  all. 

At  least  one  of  us  is  wrong.  To  work  and  to 
love  and  to  bear  children.  That  sounds  easy 
enough.  But  the  way  we  live  establishes  so 
many  things  of  much  more  importance. 

Far  down  the  dim,  hot  valley  I  could  see  the 
Walking  Woman  with  her  blanket  and  black  bag 
over  her  shoulder.  She  had  a  queer,  sidelong 
gait,  as  if  in  fact  she  had  a  twist  all  through  her. 

Recollecting  suddenly  that  people  called  her 
lame,  I  ran  down  to  the  open  place  below  the 
spring  where  she  had  passed.  There  in  the 
bare,  hot  sand  the  track  of  her  two  feet  bore 
evenly  and  white. 


THE    END 


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DUE  AS  STAMPED  BELOW 


MAR  2  7  1997 


<r 

59 

~=3- 

cr 

\a 


FORA 


12.000(11/95) 


72755 


GENERAL  LIBRARY  -  U.C.  BERKELEY 


BDQ0122M7D 


-2,  4.  £,4  2-S 


A 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


